That the United States of America is controlled by a criminally perverse, two party ruling class should be obvious to any reasonable (not rational, for the above-named people are very rational) person not living in what Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existential writer, called bad faith (mauvaise foi).

Bad faith is based on Sartre’s premise that people are radically free despite social and biological constraints; in each person’s consciousness they sense this but choose to play games, to perform for themselves and others, and to act as if they have no choices when they do. They deny their freedom. This is not lying but a form of self-deception since one cannot lie to oneself for “the one to whom the lie is told and the one who lies are one and the same person, which means that I must know in my capacity as a deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived,” writes Sartre. This should be so obvious but it escapes most people who imbibe psychobabble.

Lying is different since it involves other people. “The essence of the lie implies in fact that the liar actually is in complete possession of the truth which he is hiding,” added Sartre. This cynical consciousness that knows the truth but denies it to others is a perfect description of  politicians, propagandists, intelligence services, and their media mouthpieces. They know they are lying and are proud of it, but of course they will never admit it. Regular people also lie regularly but with not the same tremendous social consequences.

People often say that certain people really believes their own lies, that they are deluded, but this is impossible.

I begin with this brief excursion into philosophy (and psychology) because I recently read a fine journalist, Patrick Lawrence, in an otherwise excellent article – “Trump, Bibi, and Ayn Rand’s ghost” – write the following about war criminals Trump and Netanyahu’s recent dinner meeting in which  Netanyahu shows Trump a letter he wrote nominating Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, that Medea Benjamin of Code Pink rightly called “surreal:

We must reason through the matter such that we are able to recognize that these two appalling men were serious in their self-congratulation. The idea of themselves they presented before the media cameras is to them genuine: They sincerely understand themselves in this way—virtuous, courageous, standing heroically alone, bearing the world’s banner forward. (my emphasis)

Of what are such people made? This is our question. Attempting our answer leads us beyond politics and policy and into the spheres of psychology and pathology. I have long contended that any true understanding of global affairs cannot leave out consideration of the mental and emotional makeup of those who, for better or worse, are in positions of leadership. The Israeli PM, a case in point, exhibits clear symptoms of clinical psychosis if by this we mean a frayed relationship with reality.

Now Patrick Lawrence most forcefully and eloquently often condemns Trump and Netanyahu and their ilk as the genocidal war criminals that they are. Because I admire his work so much, I hesitate to pick up on his point about their sincerity, but I think it is essential to do so because of its wider implications.

Sartre claimed “sincerity,” purportedly the anti-thesis of self-deception, takes one deeper into self-deception. It goes to Patrick’s  question of what are such people made, of what are we all made; it goes behind psychology to its philosophical presuppositions and beyond the issue of pathology to a theological analysis of evil. While Lawrence’s analysis is focused not on these matters but on Ayn Rand’s influence on Trump, Netanyahu, and the wider individualistic culture – an astute analysis – it respectfully needs an a priori corrective.

I maintain that not for a second do Trump and Netanyahu believe they are genuine or virtuous or believe their own lies. They are the perfect examples of hypocrites, as in the word’s etymological sense of stage actor; pretender, dissembler, from the Greek hypokritēs. To repeat: it is impossible to believe one’s own lies since one knows they are not the truth one withholds.

Since it is obvious from their own words and actions and can be followed in real time video by any concerned person that they enthusiastically support the genocide of the Palestinians without an iota of compunction, can we say they are mentally ill?  I think not. That would suggest that if in some alternative universe they were tried for their crimes and convicted, they should be sent to a mental institution, not a prison, because they are sick. They are far beyond sick and are the current examples of their nations’ predecessors’ support for massive war crimes for a very long time. Both the U.S.A. and Zionist Israel were founded on similar claims of being  God-ordained countries that hid the satanic violence they used against native peoples and anyone who dared to suggest God was not on their sides.

Are they, as Lawrence says of Netanyahu, out of touch with reality? I think not. In any case, whose reality? Those in power, with the corporate mass media and tech companies as accomplices, create their own reality, as in the famous quote attributed to a George W. Bush aid by Ron Suskind: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” This is even truer today with the use of artificial Intelligence. Their reality is not yours, mine, or Patrick Lawrence’s. Their facts are not ours. In any case, to suggest Netanyahu is out of touch with “reality” would suggest mental illness, not evil intent. Sartre would say that to do so is to excuse him, which is clearly not Patrick’s intention. The result, however, of saying that Netanyahu and Trump sincerely think of themselves as genuine does exactly that.

One can, of course, reject Sartre’s philosophical premise about freedom, bad faith, and lying in favor of psychological and biological explanations. This is the modern approach, which is commonplace. It assumes much. It needs to be understood within the historical context of the decline of religion and the rise of science, modernism, and post-modernism. It is not scientific, however, but pseudo-scientific, and delusional on its own claims to being scientific. I maintain that it fails to comprehend the nature of evil.

But like Sartre and Dostoevsky, I too believe we are fundamentally free. Which is not to say we are not confronted with biological and social limitations on that freedom. We are. But fundamentally we have free will.

In the ancient tragedy Oedipus Rex, known in its Greek original as Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus commits two heinous acts: he kills his father and marries his mother. He commits crimes against society and sins against the gods. But he does so unknowingly, unconsciously, as the play makes clear. Throughout the Western world in morality and law it has become accepted, as Aristotle argues in his Ethics, that consciousness and will are necessary for acts to be ethically bad or good.

If Netanyahu, Trump, and their ilk (to be clear, by ilk I mean Biden and former U.S. presidents and Israeli prime ministers before Netanyahu) are not conscious but believe they are being virtuous by mass murdering Palestinians and so many others, then they, like Oedipus, deserve sympathy. For they know not what they do. But they clearly know, so they deserve no sympathy. They deserve condemnation.

What could possess them, and all the other political leaders, to commit mass murder over and over again while reveling in their “accomplishments,” and to speak casually about using nuclear weapons? For that is what they do. I should emphasize that I am not referring to individuals who commit murder and other horrible crimes but to political leaders backed by millions of supporters. Institutional leaders who quite rationally sit in offices discussing the best methods for slaughtering millions.

Why do they act this way? Why did Hitler? Harry Truman with Hiroshima and Nagasaki? George W. Bush with Iraq? You know all the names, or should. They are legion, as are the statistics. The demonic nature of U.S. history from the start is there for all to contemplate, as the late theologian David Ray Griffin has documented in a number of books. No amount of feigned amnesia will erase the bloody truth of American history, the cheap grace we bestow upon ourselves. It is demonic, as is the history of Zionism in Palestine.

So we are left with the question that has engaged people for millennia: What is the nature of evil? The demonic? While not here entering into a long analysis of this question, I will cast my vote with those, such as Soren Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Herman Melville, et al., who have claimed it goes much deeper than psychological sickness to a spiritual level and that the Enlightenment’s error was that it lacked a devil.

Satan is hard character to fathom, but when he is strutting his stuff, the consequences of his evil are blatantly real in the actions of those who have sold their souls for his favors.

In Melville’s Moby Dick the possessed Ahab says to Starbuck and to us:

Ahab is forever Ahab, man. This whole act is immutably decreed. ‘T’was rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant, I act under orders.

The same clarity of mind and will can be said of Trump, Netanyahu, and their ilk. They know from whence their orders come; they echo Ahab’s words that “from hell’s heart” and “for hate’s sake” they will kill the innocent and exult in the slaughter.

God and Satan battle on.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

On June 16, Trump posted to his Truth Social and to Facebook, this warning for everyone in Tehran to evacuate the City:

He has said there that America is in this war not to invade Iran but to protect Israel. However if Iran will have any success, then Americans, and not ONLY Israelis, will be bombing Iran. (And, of course, virtually all of Israel’s weapons do already come from America.)

The U.S. Government, and not ONLY Israel’s, actually invaded Iran on June 13 and had co-planned that aggression together.

So, this invasion of Iran IS the policy of the U.S. Government, and not (as the propaganda describes it) ONLY the policy of Israel’s Government.

And here was Trump’s Truth Social post on that day:

In that post, he unintentionally made clear that he never actually “negotiated” with Iran; he ORDERED Iran to do Netanyahu’s bidding. And, NOW, he and Netanyahu intend to forcibly (militarily) regime-change Iran, simply because Iran refused to comply with Netanyahu’s (and Trump’s, and Biden’s) DEMAND (that Iran be subordinated to Israel).

This is now heading into WW3. On June 16, the excellent news-site, which analyzes international-policy issues of protecting Russia from the U.S. empire’s constant aggressions to weaken or replace Russia’s Government, en.topcor.ru/news/, headlined “CRINK Air Force Could Help Iran Stand Up to Israel,” and here was its grim but entirely realistic analysis:

The military defeat of Iran, if it also leads to the beginning of the process of disintegration of the Islamic Republic into a number of quasi-states, will become the gravest geopolitical defeat [that the] informal anti-Western alliance CRINK led by Russia and China [have faced]. The ally [member, actually: Iran is the “I” in “CRINK”] must be saved, but how, exactly?

At the moment, the war between Israel and Iran is characterized by a remote exchange of air strikes using aircraft, ballistic missiles and kamikaze drones, as well as sabotage and terrorist attacks by Israeli special services in the Iranian rear.

Given that they have no common border and the US’s stated non-interference, large-scale ground operations are out of the question, so sending international brigades of Russian, North Korean or Chinese volunteers to help the Persians makes no sense. However, Tehran would certainly not refuse help in the fight against Israeli aviation, so it is worth remembering that something similar has already happened in modern history.

“Flying Tigers”

Let us recall that even before the start of World War II, a war between the Chinese Republic and the Japanese Empire that had attacked it had already begun in the European theater of operations in Southeast Asia on July 7, 1937. At the same time, the Japanese were taking out the poorly prepared Chinese aviation with one hand. However, in that historical period, China enjoyed support not only from the USSR, but also from the USA.

Retired US Air Force Major Claire Lee Chennault, sent there as a military adviser, proposed creating a special air unit in which the pilots would be American volunteers flying American planes. And that was done. President Roosevelt officially allowed US Air Force pilots to take leave and fight on a purely volunteer basis on the side of China against Japan.

A special aviation unit called the Flying Tigers was then created, consisting of three fighter squadrons flying American aircraft purchased under Lend-Lease. Its pilots signed a contract with the Chinese private firm CAMCO (Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company), under the terms of which they received $500 for each enemy aircraft destroyed.

American volunteers successfully fought on the side of the Chinese Republic until 1942, after which the Flying Tigers were withdrawn from the Chinese Air Force and included in the 23rd Fighter Group of the 10th Air Force of the US Army, and in 1943 it was transformed into the 14th Air Force of the US Army, consisting of 60 bombers and more than 100 fighters. Their commander, Claire Lee Chennault, became a general.

Legion “Condor”

Around the same time, the Condor Legion, created in Nazi Germany to help the future Franco regime in Spain, was operating in the European theatre of military operations. The number of this “volunteer” unit was relatively small, reaching 5,5 thousand people.

However, in the Third Reich, Condor was seen as a training ground for personnel, a testing ground for modern weapons, and a source of up-to-date combat experience. In addition to four bomber squadrons and four fighter squadrons, the legion included anti-aircraft and anti-tank defense units, an armored group of four battalions, transport sections, anti-tank artillery, and flamethrower units.

During the Spanish Civil War, the German army trained its best future aces and tested the latest aircraft that later fought in World War II. The Europeans intend to do something similar today, sending a so-called fighter coalition to Ukraine to help the Zelensky regime, which will protect Kyiv and the right bank from Russian missile and air strikes.

CRINK Air Army?

Returning to the topic of Iran, one must ask why, in fact, Russia, the DPRK and China should be interested in Tehran not losing and not following the path of Syria, which lost its sovereignty and turned into a terrorist enclave?

Our country needs Iran as a friendly partner, covering the southern flank and providing access to the Indian Ocean through the Caspian Sea. The oil fields that Israel threatens to bomb already belong to Beijing, which has invested huge amounts of money in the Iranian oil and gas sector. And for Pyongyang, Tehran has long been a technological partner in the development and production of various weapons.

What could the CRINK alliance actually do to help its ally, who has been dealt a vile blow and is being prepared to be destroyed by “Western partners” at the hands of Israel? Based on the above, there are two possible paths.

The first is the creation of an international volunteer unit of Russian, North Korean and Chinese “vacationers” who would receive modern fighters and air defense systems purchased by Iran under Lend-Lease and would go to gain real combat experience in air battles against the ultra-modern Israeli aviation.

Bearing in mind that the Russian Federation is facing a direct conflict with NATO, which has placed its bets on aviation, the DPRK has South Korea right next door, and the AUKUS alliance has already been created against China and a military operation against Taiwan is looming, such relevant experience in air combat would be, to put it mildly, not superfluous. Taking it into account, the Russian and Chinese defense industries could appropriately modify their aircraft and create a center for joint training of pilots from Iran, the DPRK, the Russian Federation and China.

The second path is a little less demonstrative and involves the creation of a hypothetical aviation PMC, for the needs of which Tehran could buy modern aircraft from Russia and China and hire vacationing pilots from the Russian Federation, China and, possibly, North Korea, who would be ready to cover Iran from Israeli air strikes.

There are options, if there is a desire.

All of the propaganda in The West PRESUMES that The West has decency and international law on its side and that all OTHER countries are inferior to it — less good, less decent, than are the U.S.-and-allied nations. The reality is the exact opposite.

For example, the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia (which blacklists — blocks from linking to — sites that aren’t CIA-approved) article on “CRINK” redirects the reader to their article “Axis of Upheaval”, which opens:

“Axis of Upheaval” is a term coined in 2024 by Center for a New American Security foreign policy analysts Richard Fontaine and Andrea Kendall-Taylor and used by many foreign policy analysts,^[1][2][3] military officials,^[4][5] and international groups^[6] to describe the growing anti-Western collaboration between Russia under Vladimir Putin, Iran, China, and North Korea beginning in the early 2020s. It has also been called the “axis of autocracies“,^[7][8][9] “quartet of chaos“,^[10][11][12] the “deadly quartet“^[4] or “CRINK“.^[13][a]

The loose alliance generally represented itself in diplomatic addresses and public statements as an “anti-hegemony” and “anti-imperialist” coalition with intentions to challenge what it deemed to be a Western-dominated global order to reshape international relations into a multipolar order according to their shared interests. While not a formal bloc, these nations have increasingly coordinated their economic, military, and diplomatic efforts, making strong efforts to aid each other to undermine Western influence.^[1]

Central to its opening paragraph is the Center for a New American Security (CNAS); and, as is made clear at one of the CIA’s NON-approved sites, the “Militarist Monitor”, their article “Center for a New American Security” (which thus is not used as a source by Wikipedia) makes clear that CNAS is totally neoconservative (a marketing-arm of the U.S. weapons-manufacturing industry), but even that site (MM) says nothing about who funds it. Another CIA-banned site, “WSWS”, has a far more comprehensive article about CNAS, titled “Democratic think tank plots war against Russia and China: What is the Center for a New American Security?”, and it makes explicit that CNAS’s main donors are “Defense contractors” (which sell ONLY to the U.S. Government and its allies) and secondarily “High tech” (which sell both to those Governments and to the public). In other words: the CIA represents the billionaires who are heavily invested in those two industries — as well as in the ‘news’-media (such as Wikipedia) that propagandize for America’s armaments companies in their ‘news’, editorials, and ads. (For example: even if a pharmaceutical company is simply advertising in these billionaires’ ‘news’-media, it is thereby funding the necon operation.) In 1922, Walter Lippmann invented the phrase “manufacture of consent” to refer to this then-new type of ‘democracy’; but it became big-time only after Truman started the Cold War and the U.S. global-hegemonic empire, on 25 July 1945.

The hegemonic (or “hegemoniacal”) global empire that U.S. President Truman started on 25 July 1945, needs now, finally, to be defeated decisively. This means without reaching the stage of a nuclear war against Russia, because that could end ONLY in the defeat of both sides and the end of all human civilization. However, I am personally inclined to think that The West have become SO desperate to rule the entire world, so that Russia — and perhaps all of the CRINK — need now to announce publicly that they will NOT allow Iran to be defeated, and that this means that they ARE willing to go nuclear against America and Israel, in order to PREVENT Iran’s defeat — if that’s what would be needed in order to PREVENT the U.S. from providing such backup to Israel’s invasion of Iran.

Trump (like Biden) never planned for that possibility. If there is to be a WW3, then the most evil empire in all of history, America’s empire, must be prevented from starting it (e.g., by extending Israel’s war against Iran into becoming fully a U.S.-Israel invasion of Iran). It must instead be started by their main targets — CRINK — if it MUST start, at all. The initiator of a war (such as Israel and the U.S. are, in regard to their joint war against Iran) always has the advantage of surprise (such as on June 13th), and thus the higher likelihood of eliminating the other side’s central command (as Israel has largely done). That way (by CRINK’s joining with Iran on this war), if there will be any future afterwards, it WON’T be dominated by the world’s most evil nations — the U.S.-empire nations. Planning for a post-WW3 world has now become important, because of Trump’s commitment now of greatly increased U.S. backup of Israel’s war to conquer Iran. Post-WW3 would be hell in any case, but simply allowing the U.S.-Israel-UK empire to take the entire world would LIKEWISE be hell. And that’s what we all are now heading toward.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

Image by Levi Meir Clancy.

The world is witnessing an unconscionable silence as Israel, an occupying power, imposes a total food blockade on Gaza—an act of collective punishment against a captive civilian population. As famine tightens its grip and American-made bombs rain from the sky, global leaders stand by—paralyzed, indifferent, or willfully complicit—while Israel renders Gaza uninhabitable.

Earlier this week, Israel targeted the only functioning medical facility serving over a million people in northern Gaza. Al Ahli Baptist Hospital was given just 20 minutes—in the dead of night—to evacuate hundreds of patients and wounded civilians. This second attack on the medical facility was enabled by then-U.S. President Joe Biden’s exoneration of Israel for its earlier massacre targeting the same hospital in October 2023—an assault that killed over 500 civilians sheltering outside its grounds.

But this was not an isolated attack. Hospitals, medical facilities, ambulances, and first responders have been systematically and relentlessly targeted in Gaza as in no other war in modern memory. Doctors have been kidnapped or killed while performing surgeries. Ambulances bombed mid-rescue. Entire medical complexes reduced to rubble while filled with patients, newborns, and the wounded. This is not collateral damage—it is a campaign of annihilation against the very institutions meant to save lives. In Gaza, saving lives has become a death sentence.

The United Nations, constrained by the U.S. veto power, has failed to pass a resolution demanding an end to what many increasingly recognize as genocide. Meanwhile, the United States—self-styled as a beacon of human rights—actively abets these atrocities. It supplies Israel with massive bombs, including 2,000-pound munitions, enabling their use in densely populated areas. This is not merely a moral failing; it is a flagrant violation of both U.S. and international laws governing military aid.

Much of this impunity stems from the legacy of Donald Trump emboldened Israel through a series of reckless, one-sided decisions: recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, slashing humanitarian aid to Palestinians, and endorsing illegal Jewish-only colonies on stolen Palestinian land. Trump gave Israel carte blanche to act without fear of accountability. His abject support signaled that no matter how flagrant the violations, there would be no consequences—only more weapons, more diplomatic protection, and deeper impunity.

Today, Israel carries out its campaign of destruction while invoking Trump’s so-called “vision” for Gaza—an evil blueprint of ethnic cleansing. This vision has become a license of an Israeli roadmap for dispossession, displacement, and death.

This has indulged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s relentless appetite for Palestinian land—prolong the suffering of Israeli captives, Palestinian prisoners, and the people of Gaza. His refusal to pursue a meaningful ceasefire or prisoner exchange is a calculated political maneuver. The ongoing war serves his far-right racist coalition, distracts from his legal troubles, and consolidates his grip on power while advancing an expansionist agenda. In the process, Gaza has become what can only be described as a starvation death camp—where civilians are punished collectively, denied food, water, medicine, and even hope.

Meanwhile, in the occupied West Bank, Israeli military raids and settler mobs have escalated dramatically. Entire communities are being uprooted and terrorized with impunity. Yet, the Palestinian Authority (PA)—the supposed protector of Palestinians—has shown paralyzing impotence. Rather than confronting Israeli aggression or protecting its people, the PA functions as a subcontractor for the occupation, policing its own population while Israeli forces and armed settlers freely brutalize civilians. Its failure to act has not only eroded its legitimacy but made it complicit in the very oppression it claims to oppose.

And still, the international community looks away.

But perhaps the most disgraceful silence comes not from Washington or Brussels—but from Arab capitals. This is not mere neglect or indifference. It is betrayal—a betrayal rooted in cowardice, authoritarianism, and self-preservation at the expense of justice.

The regimes in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and others have become accessories to genocide and complicit in the siege on Gaza. Their silence, their closed borders, their collaboration and normalization with Israel—all point to a level of complicity that history will neither forget nor forgive. As Gaza’s children starve and entire families are buried beneath rubble, Arab leaders ingurgitate in palaces, and issue timid statements devoid of conviction, or consequence.

It is a painful irony that while protests erupt in cities like London, Paris, and New York, there is near-total silence in Cairo, Riyadh, Amman, and Abu Dhabi. The moral clarity of Western citizens who take to the streets in solidarity with the Palestinians underscores the betrayal of those who claim religious, linguistic, and cultural kinship with them. But the failure is not only at the top. Public apathy, and resignation in many Arab and Muslim societies have enabled this silence—allowing Israel to persist in its crimes. A people conditioned to accept humiliation cannot demand justice.

The evil of occupation and military aggression is sustained not only through bombs and blockades but through the slow erosion of courage and moral standards. Atrocities once shocking now pass as routine. The world becomes numb. The killing of children, the destruction of homes, and the denial of basic necessities no longer elicit outrage. The question becomes not how such acts are tolerated, but when genocide becomes mere statistics—counting whether more or fewer people were killed today compared to yesterday.

This normalization turns ordinary people into complicit actors—bureaucrats who process arms shipments, journalists who frame one-sided narratives, citizens who choose silence over dissent. All become part of a system that sustains injustice.

A genocide is unfolding in real time, and the silence is not just deafening—it is damning. It is time for the people in Arab and Muslim capitals to at least join the protestors in Western cities and break this silence. To speak with moral clarity. To meet the demands of the moment. And to reject the normalization of evil in Gaza.

The post The Deafening Silence: Arab Complicity and the Normalization of Evil in Gaza appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jamal Kanj.

On April 8, Glenn Kessler, the ‘fact-checker’ for the Democratic Party billionaire Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post, headlined “Vance’s whopper on alleged Social Security fraud: The vice president falsely claims that 40 percent of calls to a retirement program involve fraud.” And he documented there, via links, that it was, indeed, a “whopper” of a lie, for which any public official ought to be drawn and quartered. Kessler — whom I have in prior articles criticized for misrepresentation in his statements, didn’t do that in this instance, at all, because he didn’t even need to in order to make his point against the Party of Republican billionaires (and their deceived voters who support those people, just as in the Party of Democratic billionaires). Click onto that article by Kessler in order to see his evidences; judge it for yourself. I didn’t find even one misrepresented or misused source in ANY of his linked-to sources. He proved there that President Trump is trying to slash as much as he can from Social Security. At the same time, I might add, his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, speaking at NATO, on April 4, said that

We’re going to have to spend more on national security, because we have a global footprint, and that’s the point that I think has been made and missed in a lot of places, okay. We’re going to have to increase defense spending in our country.

Trump intends to take money out of Social Security so that he can spend more on ‘Defense’ which means Aggression (such as by invading Greenland?).

On April 7, Fortune magazine bannered “Trump’s tariff formula used the wrong value in its calculations, conservative think tank says. ‘This whole thing was rigged’” and reported that “The formula the White House used to calculate its recent tariff is based on an error that roughly quadrupled the rates from what they should have been.” One of the economists said that “the administration hadn’t made a mistake so much as intentionally fudged the math to get the outcome officials wanted.

‘This whole thing was rigged, …It was a manipulated way to get very high tariffs because President Trump wanted to announce very high tariffs.’” Another of the economists said, “Our view is that the formula the administration relied on has no foundation in either economic theory or trade law.” Again, Trump was simply reckless.

Furthermore, on April 6, CNN reported that,

The 1,300-person National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH, was established in 1970 to ensure “every man and woman in the Nation safe and healthful working conditions and to preserve our human resources.”

On Tuesday, [April 1st] an estimated two-thirds of its staff was cut, or about 870 workers, as part of sweeping reductions across federal health agencies that wiped out entire divisions focused on the health and safety of miners, firefighters, health-care workers and others in one day.

“It’s a small thing, but it’s massive in terms of its impact and its importance,” said John McDonough, professor of the practice of public health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “And they’ve just wiped it off the face of the Earth.

In addition, on April 8, the anonymous “Moon of Alabama” blogger, who is one of the most universally respected commentators on U.S. Governmental policies (and I have never found him to have misrepresented or falsely used any of his linked-to sources) headlined “An Economic Advisor’s Weird Theory,” and exposed the outright stupidity of statements in an April 7 White House speech by the chief of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisors, Steve Miran, who, as MoA accurately summarized and commented upon Miran’s argument, “Miran says the U.S. military ensures the ‘financial stability and the credibility’ of U.S. borrowing. It does so only in that it destroys small countries which are trying to turn away from trading in dollars. Iraq and Libya are prime examples of this.” Miran even had alleged there that other countries — and Miran cited especially both China and Brazil, both of which nations are, in fact, phasing-out their acceptance of U.S. dollars in their international commerce — can engage in international commerce only “because they can transact in U.S. dollars backed by U.S. Treasuries,” and so “they are able to trade freely with each other and prosper.” Miran was arguing that countries such as China and Brazil can prosper ONLY because of the existence of the U.S. dollar. (It’s yet another of Amercia’s indispensable gifts to the world.) The Trump Administration is American exceptionalism that goes so far into the Twilight Zone of lies and myth as to be insane, if it is not plain idiotic. But, in either case, it is so irresponsible, so reckless, so unconcerned with the public’s welfare, as to pose an enormous threat to the entire world, especially because all of the Trump foreign policies equate international economic competition with international war; and, therefore, this Administration transcends mere stupidity: it is outright evil. Using the military for what are actually purposes of economic competition is plain evil, and equates the U.S. Government internationally as being a gangster, an international pirate nation. Moreover, it’s a sanctimonious one. Trump’s international policies falsely presume that America is being aggressed-against, economically exploited, by every other nation on Earth, which should instead bow down to what virtually the entire world considers to be “The Biggest Threat to World Peace.” Yes, under Trump, America is feared, because it constantly is threatening other nations. This won’t end well for anybody — except, perhaps, for America’s billionaires. (But, now, even Republican ones are being shocked at Trump’s recklessness.)

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

Despite the fact that of the approximately 10,000 war criminals who left Europe via the so-called “ratlines”, about 5,000 were settled in the republic, all of Milei’s predecessors for some reason preferred to limit themselves to feigned concern about the issue, but not to proceed with the publication of any materials. Perhaps, this is due to fear and reluctance to reveal the names of the heirs of the fascists, many of whom could have acquired a famous surname, built a business or a political career with the bloody money of their ancestors.

It is symbolic that the decision to fully declassify the documents took place 80 years after the liberation of Auschwitz. Of course, the documents should have been released much earlier, but even now its publication will be more relevant than ever. In an era when the Canadian parliament is honouring an SS veteran, while there are rumors of secret list of alleged Nazi war criminals in Canada, when neither Russia nor Israel were presented at the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, when streets and squares in Ukraine are named after war criminals, the world needs to know and remember the truth!

All this is not just a part of history that cannot be simply forgotten or rewritten. No matter how much some politicians or even states would like silence such information, it is also a reminder that not everyone in this world is as righteous as they are trying to portray themselves.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Rom Cretu.

The juxtapositions are Orwellian. This weekend marked the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when racial justice marchers "rewrote the story of the civil rights movement in their blood"; it also saw the current regime move ever further to erase that story and so many others by deleting thousands of images of unholy diversity - women, minorities, yes the Enola Gay - and banning related, pernicious words: "at risk," "bias," "equity," "female," "marginalize," "systemic," "victims," the history of who we've been and tried to become. Beyond evil.

Thus is an alternate reality constructed under the rubric of a new Bigots 'R Us ruling party. "Climate" is scrubbed from government websites, we're shaking down Canada in a fantastical trade and drug war over imaginary fentanyl labs, we're awash in a "national energy emergency" as we drill for more oil and gas under less review than ever before, food stamps, cancer research, safety nets and humanitarian aid are "bad" but more billions for billionaires is "good, "free speech" means locking up opponents of genocide, Rep. Al Green should be ejected from civil discourse for shaking "his pimp cane" at the fuehrer, and people/airplanes on the East coast are scrambling to avoid falling space debris from "rapid, unscheduled disassembly" of things badly assembled by the unelected Nazi who's already inflicting many of these other ills.

Meanwhile the Dept. of Defense, run by drunken Christo-fascist and sexual predator Pete Hegseth, is safeguarding our national security by declaring "DEI is dead" and moving to obliterate any toxic remnants of racial or gender equity as a social good. The Gulf-of-Mexico-partial A.P. says the Pentagon has flagged and vowed to delete from websites over 26,000 photos for dubious diversity-adjacent connections. Some choices were clear-cut. Gone are all notable military females or people of color: Col. Jeannie Leavitt, America's first female fighter pilot, the first three women to graduate from the Marine Corps’ infantry training, World War II Medal of Honor winner Pfc. Harold Gonsalves (suspiciously brown), ditto Army Sgt. Maj. Ernesto Lopez Jr. graduating from Lackland Air Force Base and three of his relatives serving in the National Guard (ditto).

Other choices seemed just-right-no-brainers, but proved otherwise. Their move to obliterate the famed Tuskegee Airmen, the nation's first Black military pilots who served in a segregated WW ll unit, met with outrage, after which the Air Force quickly reversed itself; the White House charged the perps with "malicious compliance." Because these cretins are as stupid as they are venal, their most Leslie-Nelson-movie-dumb move was removing six photos of the historic B-29 aircraft Enola Gay, which dropped the world's first atomic bomb on Japan in 1945. Its pilot, Col. Paul Tibbetts Jr., had fondly named the plane after his mother Enola Gay Tibbetts, which okay is pretty weird in itself, but still never imagining the stupid of the future. On social media, many so-gay memes giddily popped up, along with several photos of a newly christened Enola Straight.

More stupid followed. Several soldiers named Gay - Sgt. Major A.C. Gay, Ensign George H. Gay (Battle of Midway) were summarily erased, and Brig. Gen. Jason Woodworth, nice and white but posing at Camp Pendleton with Philip Nguyen and Thu Ha Anders at a Vietnamese display during Diversity Celebration Day. Also photos of an Army Corps dredging project in California after they noted biologists were recording fish data - breed, weight...gender. More random idiocy, either perpetrated by AI or ketamine-fueled DOGE bros, led to the perplexing disappearance of "Deadlift contenders raise the bar pound by pound” and "Minnesota brothers reunite in Kuwait." Commemorative months - black, women's, Hispanic history - are already gone. With up to 100,000 items eventually targeted, many wonder how long the Dept of Transportation will survive.

Though King Donnie mostly looks at pictures, a word purge soon started, with over 400 terms disappeared by the guy who on Day One issued the executive order, "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.” Now banished by regime decree - encompassing government memos, guidelines, public-facing sites and possibly contracts - is language that tracks our political, social, moral history, often exposing a racist bent that views "diversity" as inherently at odds with "merit."and fairness a non-starter. Banned are accessible, activism, advocate, sense of belonging, cultural heritage, climate crisis, ethnicity, excluded, female, gender, health disparity, historically, multicultural, tribal, political, race, sex, social justice, women.
Purged from NIH records: obesity, fluoride, bird flu, opioids, stem cell, vaccine, abortion, peanut allergies (a Marxist hoax).

To revise the future, one must revise the past - when, you know, America was great. This moment of chaos depends on it, which is why record crowds visited Selma, Alabama on Sunday to mark the 60th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, when hundreds of civil rights leaders and non-violent activists both black and white attempted to march from Selma to Montgomery across the Edmund Pettus Bridge to demand voting rights for African Americans. They came to remember it, to honor it, to pay tribute to the fortitude of John Lewis and all the foot soldiers who came under and endured daily attacks - "We went where we were called" - and to reiterate that for far too many their long fight for voting rights, for equal justice, for the essential freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution remains, now more than ever, "an unfinished endeavor."

In that era of Jim Crow laws and KKK lynchings, almost a year after passage of the Civil Rights Act, Selma, Dallas County, Alabama and much of the American south was still a white supremacist police state. Not long before, white nationalist terrorists had bombed Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four young girls; it took many decades before any were brought to justice. Despite growing protests on behalf of voting and other rights, thanks to still-prevalent poll taxes, literacy tests, widespread intimidation and racist state leaders like Alabama's die-hard segregationist Gov. George Wallace, less than 1% of Black people, even if middle-class, were eligible to vote in many areas. "This was a vicious, violent system," recalled one activist. "You could die trying to register to vote and wasn’t nobody going to do anything about it."

The Selma march was sparked by both that fight and the murder in nearby Marion of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old veteran, organizer, father and church deacon as he tried to protect his mother and 82-year-old grandfather from being beaten by cops at an earlier voting rights protest. In response, Alabama state trooper James Fowler shot Jackson twice in the stomach; he died 8 days later. No charges were filed against Fowler until 2007, when he pled guilty to 2nd-degree manslaughter and served less than six months. Galvanized by Jackson's murder, John Lewis, then the young head of SNCC, decided to lead about 500 peaceful protesters, black and white, from Selma to the state capitol of Montgomery to denounce Jackson's death and insist on the rights he'd died for. First, though, they had to walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Mid-way, they were met with a phalanx of billy-club-armed state troopers, who issued their famous two-minute warning for the marchers to turn back. Within less than a minute, they began viciously beating the men, women and children , eventually turning tear gas, cattle prods and whips on them. At least 58 people were injured; many were hospitalized. Lewis, who later served decades in the House as "the conscience of Congress," famously had his skull fractured by a trooper's baton as he lay on the ground. For years, he declared that "Selma, the bridge, was a test of the belief that love was stronger than hate. And it was." Lewis' assault, and all the rest, was captured by James 'Spider' Martin, a 25-year-old photographer for the Birmingham News, who documented both Jackson's shooting and its subsequent violence using his camera as "a weapon of discovery."

His images of the savage reality of voter suppression hit the front pages of newspapers across the country; ABC even interrupted coverage about the Nazis' Nuremberg trials to show them. A grateful MLK Jr. told Martin, "The whole world saw your pictures," which galvanized nationwide civil rights protests, prompted LBJ to send 2,000 National Guardsmen to escort a subsequent, larger, non-violent march to Montgomery later that month, and arguably helped nudge him to sign the Voting Rights Act that August. Today, with a resurgent right wing relentlessly working to again disenfranchise black voters - redrawn district lines, voter IDs, fewer ballot drop boxes - while persistently, essentially seeking to erase that bloody past, Martin's images of what the Selma marchers achieved and are now fighting to hold onto help keep that history alive.

On Sunday, as large crowds went to Selma to march in carefully choreographed time slots, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts launched a national exhibit of 70 of Martin's newly-restored images titled,“Selma is Now," In this dark moment, the mood of the event was a complex mix of anger, determination, fear that today's "stress test of American resolve (isn’t) being met with sufficient opposition" as in the past, when "people stood together (to) march in hope." Some spoke of "a long trench warfare," of "not seeing themselves as protagonists of this story,” feeling "stuck between fear and anxiety looking at the world on fire," wondering how many will "be willing to bleed," like John Lewis. Most vitally, they insisted on recognizing that history happened here, and will not be erased: "It's a story that needs to be told and retold...that we simply cannot let pass."

Alabama state troopers form roadblock on far side of Edmund Pettus Bridge. Spider Martin/Briscoe Center for American History

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.

When faced with two adverse unethical options, a person may try to avoid the more harmful immoral choice. This is ancient strategy people have talked and written about, and applied in various situations. In the US political parlance, the term “lesser of two evils,” is choosing the evil that will be less damaging.

There is talk about voting for the “lesser of two evils.” The rationale behind this thinking is to prevent the greater “evil” from gaining power and thus causing more havoc. This is an intelligent thing to do especially in countries where million of peoples’ future is at stake — but when the United States is involved, the well being of the entire planet is at stake.

In the US, it is understood by many that the greater evil is the Republican Party or the proverbial Charybdis. Noam Chomsky once said, “Republican Party is the most dangerous organisation in human history.” The lesser evil’s title goes to the Democratic Party or the proverbial Scylla.

In dire situations, one could accept voting for the lesser evil – Democrats. But when the Democrats don’t want to address the root causes then voting for them election after election turns into a futile exercise, while the sick state keeps on deteriorating. This is a serious problem. It’s like a person who has a tumor that in initial stages is ignored due to carelessness. However, a timely realization as to the consequences rushes in emergency for treatment as if he/she had not headed for the doctor, the malignancy would have proved fatal.

The above example is equally applicable to the United States — a Sick Empire — physically, that is, in economic decline and mentally, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” to use Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s words spoken on April 4, 1967. The US has steadfastly held on to the title of “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” as if it doesn’t want to prove Dr King wrong in his assessment.

The Republican Party openly supports the capitalist class by lowering taxes for the rich, opposing unions, resisting pay raises, waging foreign wars or domestic ones, such as “war against drugs,” etc. In return, they get favors and election campaign contributions.

But there is something to be said about the lesser evil of the two choices.

Democratic Party is not that naked — it uses a fig leaf to cover up its hypocrisy, it pretends to be what it is not; it claims it is working for the common folks, complains about rich not paying taxes (but does not do anything), and so on. In reality, they do very little for the general public because they too get lots of money from the big donors to contest elections. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman (worth $2.5 billion), in 2024 gave $10 million to Biden-Harris campaign donated another $7 million to Kamala Harris (after Biden quit the presidential bid and nominated Harris as the Democratic candidate, without any intra-party election). Hoffman wants Harris to fire Lina Khan, the FTC chair who is fighting big corporate mergers and monopolistic corporate practices. This is what Hoffman said:

“I do think that Lina Khan is a person who is not helping America in her job in what she’s doing. And so, I would hope that Vice President Harris would replace her.”

Expedia Chairman Barry Diller (worth $4.5 billion) called Khan a “dope,” but then he said he misspoke; he wants her fired. Who knows, may be Harris would listen to her paymasters, as has been the custom.

It is sad that people like Lina Khan, who are honest, incorruptible, and are working for the welfare of the majority, and are rare to find in government, have to face so much opposition from the billionaire class. Lina Khan and people like her are hated by the rich, like Hoffman because they try to enforce laws which assist most people rather than fattening the already obese (financially) like Hoffman and his ilk.

The Young Turks put it rightly: “… we don’t have a democracy. We have an open auction 100%.“

Biden, when he was running for president, had told the wealthy donors:

“I mean, we may not want to demonize anybody who has made money.” “The truth of the matter is … nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change.”

One cannot not sympathize with the Democratic presidential candidates who are (or aiming to be) multimillionaires, who hobnob with billionaires, are mostly interviewed by anchors making millions of dollars, who have to feign they are for ordinary people, in order to get their vote.

But the problem with this line of strategy is that it is simply prolonging the onset of the overdue implosion rather than trying to eliminate the rot in the system. If you watch or read the news and various commentaries or watch late night shows in the liberal news media, many a times they are making fun of Donald Trump, his wife and children and portray him as an evil person and thus imply Biden/Harris are virtuous people. (In the mid 1980s, then President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” hinting that the US is a sanctimonious entity.) These same people never accuse Biden or his cabinet, as bloodthirsty murderers.

So why go for the lesser evil?

The Democrats and the Republicans are almost twins,¹ as far as warring against foreign countries or overthrowing their governments is concerned. It’s within the US, where the slight difference comes into play. Democrats would not want to go total fascist at home — they permit some freedom to maintain the facade of the US being “the greatest democracy.” On the other hand, the Republicans want to treat, actually mistreat, most people indiscriminately, within and without the US, in the same fascist manner. Many people in the US don’t mind foreign countries becoming victim of US imperialistic fascist policies, either due to their ignorance or indifference or are misled by Republicans’ and Democrats’ warmongering or news media’s and think tanks’ fear inducing presentation etc. On the other hand, many people are frightened now that, it seems if Trump wins, fascism is going to hit most people in the US. That’s why most people prefer the lesser evil.

Mind you, fascism has never been absent in many people’s life in the US, such as incarcerating a huge segment of population, people who are victims of police violence (injured or killed), PTSD-(Post traumatic stress disorder) traumatized soldiers returning from fabricated bloody wars, homeless people, and so on. Most Democrats haven’t created meaningful improvement in the lives of these people.

The Democrat and Republican led governments have overthrown many governments and are still trying to overthrow many more but Democrats don’t want Trump to do that in the US, such as the purported January 6, 2021 attempt.² It was an unorganized, clumsily executed foolish attempt. Trump should have consulted the experienced hands from both parties and also the CIA before the January 6 attempt. He would have succeeded, for sure.

Q: Why will there never be a coup d’état in Washington?

A: Because there’s no American embassy there.

Is there a difference between Trump and Harris etc.?

Without a second thought, one has to admit that Trump’s virile oral member is long and ejects idiocies and hate on a non-stop basis. Trump is a very cruel person, indeed. But the question is: are Biden, Harris, Anthony Blinken, Lloyd Austin, Harris’ supporter greater evil Dick Cheney any less cruel?

No.

In fact, they are more cruel and have excessively more blood of innocents on their hands than Trump has, that is, until now. His next term will be full of vengeance and who knows, greater bloodshed. Isn’t Biden too full of hate for Palestinians, Lebanese, and Iranians or anyone fighting for their rights and want to go their separate ways? Biden, a grandfather, who still grieves for his son Beau Biden’s death in 2015 due to glioblastoma has neither shed a tear nor has grieved for the 42,511 Palestinians (including 16,660 children) plus 1974 [A Lancet article from 10 July 2024 reported a much higher estimate: “Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death⁹ to the 37 396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.” — DV ed.] (which includes 127 children) Lebanese killed by Israel with US encouragement, arms and ammunition, money, personnel, and intelligence –without which Israel could not have caused such incredible loss of lives. The opposition to war within the US is squashed by the Israel Lobby.

At this juncture in human history, who deserves more loathing, Trump or Biden and Harris? Of course, today the answer is the Biden/Harris team.

• See also a related article: “A Moral Imperative for the 2024 US Elections.”

ENDNOTES:

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by B.R. Gowani.

In this era of internet and instant communication, information on the monstrous crimes of Zionism is available for people who make an effort to be aware. Take that information and apply open-minded skepticism. Ask whether the evidence substantiates the information and its narrative.

Israeli Jews are carrying out genocide against Palestinians (something that has been ongoing for decades). Eliminating a grouping of people from existence is heinous enough, but there is also the horrific matter of what happens to the victims of Zionists before they are killed.

Redacted interviewed Dan Cohen of Uncaptured Media to report a bloodlust where Israelis are torturing and raping Palestinian prisoners, and that Israeli protestors are in the streets claiming Israelis have a right to rape these prisoners.

Cohen is in Israel telling of “the shock and trauma and hate and racism pulsing through the veins of Israeli society ….” This is exemplified by the fact that the Israeli military-run prison with its Palestinian captives:

…is not about gaining intelligence, at all. It is not about finding Israeli captives in Gaza, at all. What happens there [in the prisons] is about the most cruel punishment. It is torture with electric shock, beating, severe beatings, where if you talk to someone you are beaten until your teeth break, until your bones break, if you fall asleep, these kinds of things. People are, as we know, anally raped. Prisoners are killed. There are many who are murdered. They just never come out…. These are just [Palestinian] civilians, cause all their fighters are underground. So they take civilians from the neighborhoods, and just take them there and torture them and kill them, even top doctors. I think it is 39 medical professionals from Gaza have ah, I believe, been killed in there… (5:30 to 7:15)

Non-Zionist Jews, Jews opposed to the crimes of Zionists, must speak out against the evil, otherwise their silence may be criticised as complicity. The non-Zionist Jews are faced with the challenge of how to get their humanist message widely disseminated in opposition to Zionism.

One grouping of Jews that opposes Zionism and supports Palestinian rights is Jewish Voices for Peace. Rebecca Vilkomerson and Rabbi Alissa Wise, two leaders and former staff of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) have written Solidarity Is the Political Version of Love: Lessons from Jewish Anti-Zionist Organizing (Haymarket Books, 14 May 2024), which covers the period from 2010-2020.

Omar Barghouti, Palestinian human rights defender and cofounder of the non-violent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement for Palestinian rights, wrote the foreword to the book. Barghouti notes the difference of JVP from other progressivist Jewish organizations:

Instead of the typical Jewish American PEP (progressive except on Palestine) culture, JVP has helped a PIP culture—progressive including on Palestine …

In the face of overwhelming Jewish American support for Zionism and Israeli apartheid, JVP has insisted on growing the anti-Zionist movement to dismantle the myth of Israel’s representation of all Jews and, along with it, the complicity of the Jewish Zionist establishment in securing mainstream support in the US for funding, arming, and enabling Israel’s regime of oppression.

As Solidarity Is the Political Version of Love relates, JVP has grown and morphed over time from the “first mass Jewish civil disobedience in the Rotunda of the US Congress” to later “large-scale protests at a level none of us can remember.” (p 2) “JVP grew larger as it shifted to the left and altered the public narrative about Palestinian liberation while creating a space for Judaism beyond Zionism.” (p 2-3) JVP did not declare itself anti-Zionist until early in 2019; however, it was noted that the proportion of anti-Zionist members and staff has grown over time. (p 13)

When Haymarket Books shared the e-galley, I was informed that the authors are available for interviews. With that in mind, seven days ago I sent some questions.

The first question was based on Vilkomerson and Wise’s definition of solidarity: “as when people outside a specific community dedicate themselves to supporting the rights and aspirations of that community, taking direction on what actions to take from the community itself.” (9) Since solidarity is the leitmotif for the book, why is it that JVP identifies as Jewish voices rather than, for example, Human Voices for Peace? The name seems to set limits on solidarizing with non-Jews within its organization?

However, there is something of a work around in the book: “What did it mean to be a member if you weren’t Jewish? … So, we relied on people self-identifying as members and didn’t spend time gatekeeping peoples’ Jewishness.” (p 55) “We believe movement building is the only way to realize the world all people deserve.” (p 80)

I also asked about the propriety of donating to JVP as opposed to donating to Palestinian movements.

The Zionist NGO Monitor complains that “JVP’s funding sources are not transparent.” NGO Monitor further criticizes JVP, saying that the JVP “regards the organized Jewish community as its ‘enemy’ and ‘opponent,’ …. The strategy, as stated by JVP’s executive director Rebecca Vilkomerson, is to create ‘a wedge’ within the American Jewish community to generate the impression of polarization over Israel.” For those who are opposed to Zionist oppression of Palestinians such criticism ought to be considered as a badge of honor by the JVP.

Moreover, JVP criticizes

Israel’s ongoing apartheid policies of administrative detention—holding Palestinians without charge or trial—left Palestinians stranded in prison indefinitely. At the same time, home demolitions are a daily occurrence, with more than nine thousand structures destroyed since 2009.1 In addition to the daily indignities faced by Palestinians at checkpoints, Jewish-only settlements proliferated in the West Bank, siphoning water, developing a network of Jewish-only roads connecting the settlements to Israel, and bringing into Palestinian communities thousands of armed settler vigilantes, who regularly harassed and violently attacked Palestinians, vandalizing their property with the blessing of the Israeli army, felling ancient olive trees, and shooting at Palestinians that need to cross Jewish-only roads to reach their farms or graze their flocks. In Gaza, the situation became even more dire for Palestinians after Jewish settlers were removed in 2005, when Israel turned Gaza into an open-air prison, maintaining an illegal siege by controlling what goes in and out by air, land, and sea. (p 6)

Sounds good, sounds progressivist.

I wondered about the JVP stance on two-state vs one-state. The authors wrote, “… as a group of people in the US it was not JVP’s place to determine the number of states at all, but instead to do what we could to support a liberatory future.” (p 14)

That’s fine. But what about whether Palestine should be recognized as a state, something Israel is vehemently opposed to? An online search reveals that JVP often refers to the “state of Palestine.” This earned JVP further scorn from the NGO Monitor.

JVP takes many progressivist positions.

JVP acknowledges overwhelming Jewish communal support for Israel but sees its role as “just one prong in a multifaceted movement, led by Palestinians in the US and Palestine.” (p 16)

JVP questions its own Jewish composition: “Ashkenazi Jews colluded with and assimilated into whiteness, Jewish voices (whether Ashkenazi or not) were routinely privileged above Palestinian voices” (p 40) and its hierarchical structure. (p 61)

JVP recognizes “the weaponization of antisemitism, specifically in connection with anti-Zionism,” (p 99) and sees solidarity as the key to overcoming the Zionism that Palestinians endure drives them into isolation from violent domination. (p 102) “JVP, from the very start, has been guided by the exact opposite principle, that writ large we live in an interdependent world, that we all deserve safety, and that the way to gain safety is through solidarity.” (p 103)

Paradoxically, solidarity in a worthy cause might require splittism. Vilkomerson and Wise write, “Decoupling Jews from Israel and Jewishness from Zionism are therefore essential to the struggle against real antisemitism, toward realizing Jewish safety, and, of course, for Palestinian liberation.” (p 108)

The authors see solidarity as an expression of love:

Whatever your version of solidarity, may you practice it as an expression of love. A love that manifests as raging at the world as it is, and at the same time developing smart, intentional plans to realize the world as it should be. (p 215)

The ways in which Israel’s assault on Palestinians in Gaza exceeds the horror of nearly all wars in recent memory are too long to list: more children killed, more journalists killed, more bombs dropped, more homes destroyed, more internally displaced people, more targeting of hospitals, schools, mosques, churches and refugee camps. That’s because it’s simply not a war – it’s a genocide. (p 218)

The genocide of 186,000 Palestinians (likeliest a depressingly higher number in the three-and-a-half weeks since the Lancet article was published), requires an utmost expression of love through solidarity with the entirety of humanity. This comes through clearly and forthrightly in Solidarity Is the Political Version of Love.

There are few (or none) sizeable groupings of people who form a monolith. JVP is one Jewish grouping that deviates from Zionist Jews by upholding morality in solidarity with a shared humanity.

Israel is not alone in its evil. It is backed by governments in the West. The US is a staunch supporter of Zionism, funding it, arming it, and providing media and diplomatic cover for Israel. It points to the sine qua non of a monolith of humans united by love for fellow humans. This guiding principle would elevate humanity to the stratosphere.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

Nonetheless, aside from the otherwise splendid investigative reporting by Swann, the interview raised a question: Why is a legitimate Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation (the borders are sealed to Gaza and the seas are closed to Palestinian fishermen) and oppression described by Swann as an “horrible and evil thing”?

Is not the Israeli slow-motion genocide (since 7 October it has been accelerated), occupation, racism, discrimination, and oppression not the “horrible and evil thing”? Is the horrible and evil theft of historical Palestine by European Jews not the cause of Palestinian resistance? Is it not, per se, horrible and evil to deride a legitimate resistance against the evil of Zionism?

Back in 2008 when Israel was on an earlier mass murder binge against Palestinians and Hamas resisted, I wrote about “The Inalienable Right to Resist Occupation”:

Complicitly, the Whitehouse blamed Hamas, as did Canada’s government. Government officials in the US, Canada, and Europe spoke the same lame phrase, “Israel has a right to defend itself,” as if the slaughter being carried out by a world military power against a starving population could be construed as some kind of defense. Israel, the world’s most frequently cited violator of international law, a racist state, an occupation state built through violence and slow-motion genocide is being acknowledged as having the right to defend its criminality. This is preposterous; there is no right of an occupation regime to defend its occupation. Palestine, however, has a right to resist occupation!

Frequent guest of the Dore Show, comedian Kurt Metzger realizes the situation that Israel forces the Palestinians to live under: a “concentration camp.” The Palestinians in Gaza are presented with a choice to either live on bended knee or to resist.

However, Swann would double down on his vitriol against the Hamas resistance saying: “The Hamas attacks were violent and brutal.” The language is leading and unnecessary. Attacks by their very nature are usually violent and brutal. But why are these adjectives not applied to the violent and brutal Israeli occupation by Swann?

If there wer no occupation of historical Palestine, if there were not millions of Palestinians living outside their homeland as refugees, if Palestinians were not being systematically humiliated by Israelis, if Palestinians were not being weeded out of existence by Israelis, if Palestinians were thrown the crumb of the decency to live peacefully alongside their racist usurpers in their historical homeland, would not the rise of a resistance have been obviated?

A progressivist principle should hold that: The oppressor bears responsibility for all casualties because without the oppression, there would be no need for resistance. Ergo, criticism of the resistance of Hamas is unprincipled.

As the show’s cast rummaged over whether Israel was now carrying out a genocide, Jimmy Dore felt it necessary to describe Hamas as a terrorist organization. Hello! There are likeliest over a 100,000 Palestinians slaughtered resulting from this bogus intelligence failure, so who are the terrorists?

Ed Herman, the first author of the acclaimed media analysis, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, noted:

For decades it has been the standard practice of the U.S. mainstream media to designate Palestinian attacks on Israelis as acts of “terrorism,” whereas acts of Israeli violence against Palestinians are described as “retaliation” and “counter-terror.” This linguistic asymmetry has been based entirely on political bias. Virtually all definitions of terrorism, if applied on a nonpolitical basis, would find a wide array of Israeli operations and acts of violence straightforward terrorism. (p 119)

The commonly bandied about death toll of 30 something thousand Palestinians is atrocious, but serious voices point to a serious undercount.

On 5 July 2024, the Lancet ran its numbers: “Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.”

Ralph Nader had written months earlier: “From accounts of people on the ground, videos and photographs of deadly episode after episode, plus the resultant mortalities from blocking or smashing the crucial necessities of life, a more likely estimate, in my appraisal, is that at least 200,000 Palestinians must have perished by now and the toll is accelerating by the hour.” [emphasis added]

This time, it appears that Zionist connivance has blown up in the connivers faces and the faces of the supporters of Zionism in western governments.

There has been a catastrophic blowback against the genocidaires. Houthis in Yemen have caused disruptions to Zionist-aligned shipping in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. Even US and UK aircraft carriers fear Houthi attacks.

Former US Marine intelligence officer Scott Ritter sourced inactive Israeli generals: “Israel can’t win this war. Not only Israel can’t win this war, Israel is losing this war.”

Would an outcome where Zionist occupation, oppression, racism, genocide is defeated be a horrible and evil thing?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

He misses the point as usual. The warrants have nothing to do with that. They are about bringing those wanted for the most grievous war crimes to justice.

Prime minister Rishi Sunak then said that the move was “deeply unhelpful”, adding: “There is no moral equivalence between a democratic state exercising its lawful right to self defence and the terrorist group Hamas.”

Even Biden was singing off the same hymn-sheet saying there is “no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas” and that what’s happening in Gaza is not genocide…. a hymn of praise for Israel almost.

Of course there is no moral equivalence. As the world has witnessed, Israel’s crimes are a thousand times greater than Hamas’s and are allowed to continue without let-up, courtesy of the US and UK who dutifully carry on supplying the ordnance and weaponry. It still hasn’t penetrated enough Washington and Whitehall skulls that it is the Palestinian resistance who are exercising their lawful right to self-defence – using “armed struggle” if necessary – against Israel’s illegal military occupation, brutal 17-year blockade and decades-long murderous oppression (UN Resolutions 37/43 and 3246).

Furthermore Hamas are just as legitimate as any Israeli administration having been democratically elected under the scrutiny of international observers, a result immediately rejected at the time by the UK, Israel and the US because it didn’t happen to suit their evil purpose in the Middle East.

And why are Hamas proscribed as a terrorist organisation in the UK? Only because a group of Israel’s pimps and stooges among Westminster’s political elite say so. It would be interesting to take a vote on what the people who put them there actually think, now they know the horrendous situation in Gaza and the West Bank and the long history leading up to it. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to proscribe Likud, Netyanyahu’s terrorist party?

Cameron also claims it’s a mistake to draw moral equivalence because Palestine is not regarded as a state. Again, he isn’t paying attention. 146 of the 193 UN member states recognise Palestine, including Ireland, Norway and Spain who announced recognition just a few days ago. 11 of these are EU states, so what is Cameron drivelling about?

Fortunately, a cross-party group of 105 MPs and Lords has called on the UK Government “to do all it can to support the International Criminal Court” after Prime Minister Sunak’s remark that its decision to seek arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders was “deeply unhelpful”. In a letter addressed to Foreign Secretary Cameron they say “there is mounting evidence that Israel has committed clear and obvious violations of international law in Gaza and we strongly believe that those responsible must be held to account”. They call on the Government “to take a clear stance against any attempts to intimidate an independent and impartial international court…. The Court, its Prosecutor, and all its staff must be free to pursue justice without fear or favour”.

One of the organisers, MP Richard Burgon, said: “At every stage, our Government has failed to fulfil its moral duty to do everything it can to help save lives and prevent suffering in Gaza. It must not fail again. It must back the ICC in ensuring that there is no impunity for war crimes and it must stand up to those seeking to impede justice.”

Almost straightaway Sunak, in a surprise move, called a general election for 4 July. This means that MPs immediately cease being MPs but ministers continue in office until a new government is formed. For the next 6 weeks, then, Sunak’s crew continue to rule without being accountable to the House of Commons and could do a lot of damage. So this is a doubly dangerous time for our nation.

Meanwhile Cameron and his ignorant friends seem to think the Gaza war only started as recently as October 7. He plays up the release of 134 Israeli hostages when, on October 6 Israel was holding 5,200 Palestinians captive, including at least 170 children, and since then has abducted some 7,350 more. Why do we never hear from Cameron about the Palestinian hostages/prisoners?

And how many Palestinians had Israel killed before October 7? Answer: 10,651 slaughtered by Israel in the 23 years up to Oct 7, including 2,270 children and 656 women (Israel’s B’Tselem figures). That’s 460 a year. In that period Israel was exterminating Palestinians at the rate of 8:1 and children at the rate of 16:1.

Israel’s friends in the West like to think of Netanyahu as the leader of a Western style democracy that shares our values. Actually he’s the head of a nasty little ethnocracy with vicious apartheid policies and a 76-year record of terrorism, pursuing an extended military campaign aimed at occupying and annexing another people’s lands and resources, and showing no respect whatsoever for British values or international norms of behaviour.

So, putting aside for a moment our dislike of Hamas’s methods, shouldn’t we be asking our politicians to explain why exactly Hamas must be eliminated and the Palestinians’ homeland pulverised in the process, seeing as it is they who are under illegally military occupation and they who have the ultimate right of self-defence?

It’s easy to see where Cameron is coming from. After 3 months of genocide in Gaza, he denied Israel had broken international law. He also said it was “nonsense” to suggest that Israel intended to commit genocide. Asked if he thought Israel had a case to answer at the ICJ, he said: “No, I absolutely don’t. I think the South African action is wrong, I think it is unhelpful, I think it shouldn’t be happening…. I take the view that Israel is acting in self-defence after the appalling attack on October 7. But even if you take a different view to my view, to look at Israel, a democracy, a country with the rule of law, a country with armed forces that are committed to obeying the rule of law, to say that that country, that leadership, that armed forces, that they have intent to commit genocide, I think that is nonsense, I think that is wrong.”

So says this self-declared zionist and key stooge for Israel, one of many at Westminster who are desperate to maintain the shady US/UK-Israel alliance. Do Sunak, Cameron & co really want victory for the genocidists? It seems they do. Because they’ve pledged their undying adoration and support for that rotten apartheid regime and now the world has seen it for what it really is and their position is turning sour.

On the face of it the Hamas trio — Haniyeh, Sinwar and Dief — with competent legal representation seem likely to survive the legal process. And although many are questioning why arrest warrants are being considered for them at the same time as the mega-maniac Netanyahu there is reason to hope that, if they do come to trial, a lot of bad stuff about Israel, the US and the UK will come out. The world will then be much wiser and the ‘axis of evil’ behind it all will collapse under the weight of its own lunacy.

The UK general election will likely rid us of Sunak, Cameron and the rest of the Tory nitwits. But sitting in the waiting room is Labour’s Keir Starmer, another Israel stooge. Yes, the zionists have all angles covered.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

Our guest is the Haaretz correspondent Amira Hass, the only Israeli Jewish journalist to have spent 30 years living in and reporting from Gaza and the West Bank. She is the recipient of the 2024 Columbia Journalism Award, and on Wednesday she addressed the graduating class of the Columbia Journalism School in New York City. Hass discusses the ongoing Israeli war on Gaza, why journalists should “resist the normalization of evil and injustice,” Israel’s recent censorship of Al Jazeera, its maintenance of a strict apartheid system, its complete rejection of the prospect of Palestinian statehood and more. “Israel took Palestinian life, liberty and freedom as hostage for the past 75 years,” says Hass. “You go to Tel Aviv, you think you are in New York or you are in London — and 40, 50 kilometers away, Palestinians live in cages.”

We also play an excerpt from the student and faculty-led “People’s Graduation” held Thursday at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City in response to Columbia University’s crackdown on student protest, which culminated in the administration’s cancellation of university-wide commencement. Centering Palestinian solidarity, the People’s Graduation featured speakers including the Pulitzer Prize-winning data journalist and illustrator Mona Chalabi, who praised the work of student journalists. While “our institutions have failed us these past seven months, … we listened to your radio stations if we wanted the truth,” she said.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

There is no daylight between presidential candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump on the permanent war economy. Both tout the weapons industry as a source of jobs, jobs, jobs for Americans, never mentioning that the billions of government dollars flushed through the military-industrial complex could go for other things. Think universal health care, free higher education or maybe just the green economy – if money spent on what Politico called Bombenomics went to producing solar panels and wind turbines, we’d have jobs AND a planet not heating up at warp speed. Sadly, our two presidential contenders never met a weapon system they didn’t like. And as recent history repeats – if you spend all your cash building tanks, guns and bombs, they’re gonna get used.

Even worse, the U.S. MIC compels other countries to beef up their militaries. Take Russia. Before invading Ukraine, Moscow’s weapons industry puttered along, as did military conscription, but as soon as the Kremlin realized that it had no peace partners in the west or in Ukraine – a revelation that dawned on Moscow when then British prime minister Boris Johnson sabotaged peace talks between the two opponents in spring 2022 – things changed. Russia put itself on a war footing, so that now its industrial military base hums along, churning out tanks, hypersonic missiles (which the West lacks), rockets, guns and don’t forget nuclear bombs. Russia also placed tactical nukes in Belarus.

China, too, threatened by the U.S. over Beijing’s long-standing and very public intention peacefully to absorb Taiwan, has beefed up every aspect of its war machine. As military expert Will Schryver recently tweeted: “The U.S. is currently incapable of putting to sea more than four carriers at any given time – and no more than ~60 warships of all types. China currently has 3 carriers, almost 800 vessels and mountains of missiles.”

Meanwhile, there’s Iran – now using the Chinese satellite navigation system Beidou, which means, to quote the Sirius Report, “Iranian missiles are able to use a positioning system that the U.S. has no control over.” And Tehran could soon have nukes, thanks to Trump trashing the West’s nuclear pact with Iran and Biden inexplicably refusing to fix that bubblehead move. In other words, all these fiascos could have been avoided, seriatim, had Washington controlled its aggression and exerted its stupendous influence to promote peace. Even more critically, a worsening situation can still be avoided, if Beltway insiders pivot from sanctions, expanding foreign military bases to surround perceived enemies, fomenting color revolutions and generally behaving ruthlessly. Instead, the Empire might try the good neighbor approach, though after so many decades of violence, it might take the non-Western world a while to believe such a sea change.

And then there’s the blatant immorality of a war economy, one that depends for its health on bloodshed. Yet weapons production is one of the few manufacturing industries in the U.S. that hasn’t been entirely off-shored. This is a bad look. “What does your country make? Oh, guns, tanks and bombs, not much else.” That sends a message to the world, and it’s one, apparently, with which our rulers are not dissatisfied. After all, monomaniacal Washington’s chief carrot, (which is also its chief stick) over many decades, for recalcitrant foreign governments, has been, to rephrase renowned economist Michael Hudson: “Do what we want and we won’t bomb and obliterate you.” The fact that a principal U.S. industrial product is weaponry, helps concentrate the rest of the world’s mind on that threat.

Indeed, Biden “is supersizing the defense industry,” reports Responsible Statecraft February 23. This new National Defense Industrial Strategy would “catalyze generational change” of the U.S. defense industry. No surprise there, at a time when we recently learned that since 2014, during Biden’s stint as vice president with the Ukraine portfolio, the CIA beefed up its operations in Ukraine so that that nation essentially became the biggest CIA project in the agency’s history, bristling with agency bases and bunkers. That news appeared boastfully in the New York Times, right about the moment when it became clear that the west’s whole military project in Ukraine had flopped. (Right after the Times bragged about all these CIA bases on the Russia/Ukraine frontier, Russia used its artillery to liquidate one, thereby killing who knows how many Americans. Nothing like a fawning press so eager to flaunt intelligence “achievements” that it sends some of those achievers to their graves.)

And there’s no reason to suppose this new defense industry push won’t flop as well. The Biden gang “is proposing a generation of investment to expand an arms industry that, overall, fails to meet cost, schedule and performance standards,” Responsible Statecraft reports. In other words, President Eisenhower’s warnings about the military-industrial complex are being worse than ignored. Biden breathes new life into the MIC’s evils, and so, could truly be said to be Ike’s nemesis.

Arms makers are a powerful lobby in Washington, who “have solidified their economic influence to stave off the political potential for future national security cuts, regardless of their performance or the geopolitical environment.” They can produce lemons or systems so finicky they need constant attention – Exhibit A is the F-35 – and still sell them abroad for billions. That’s because contractors carefully situate their plants in multiple states, so they can play the jobs card with Congress. The end result is an economy that demands war and more war, to keep a huge and deathly vigorous industry purring along. Meanwhile, Responsible Statecraft asks, “What is the military really getting from more and more national security spending? Less for more. Fewer weapons than it asked for, usually late and over budget, and much of the time dysfunctional.”

That’s actually not so bad. Weapons that don’t work could mean lives saved, but they also mean other things don’t get built. Instead of a massive EV base, an expanding textile industry or a big boost to solar panel manufacturing or shoe production or assembling any of the thousands of items stamped “made in China,” we get Patriot missiles and Abrams tanks, both, by the way, not all they’re cracked up to be, judging on reports from the Ukraine War.

Biden’s all in on the twisted notion that showering dollars on armaments benefits the economy, gushing about “equipment that defends America and is made in America: Patriot missiles for the air defense batteries made in Arizona; artillery shells manufactured in 12 states across the country – in Pennsylvania, Ohio Texas…” According to Truthout February 26, Arizona and Pennsylvania “are swing states crucial to his re-election bid, while the other two are red states with Republican senators he’s been trying to win over to vote for another round of military aid to Ukraine.”

More ghoulishly, “lobbyists for the administration even handed out a map, purporting to show how much money such assistance to Ukraine would distribute to each of the 50 states.” What a profitably blood-soaked investment our Ukraine proxy war is! Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men get to die fighting for the U.S., which doesn’t have to risk any soldiers, while back home armaments makers fatten on the carnage, and the politicians promoting this gory fiasco have the nerve to try to get re-elected! For the U.S., the Ukraine War has truly been a win/win business enterprise. Which has something to do with Washington never facing reality and admitting defeat. When the going gets rough, Washington gets going, like it did from Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam and so forth. The trick is never fighting a peer competitor directly, but to bomb indiscriminately around the world, while keeping the cult of death flush with money. Eisenhower must be spinning in his grave.

The post The Evil of a Permanent War Economy appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Eve Ottenberg.

But the claim is false. Although the monks did visit the ship, they were not compensated for their time there and the ritual was not an exorcism but rather a prayer for the crew’s good fortune, according to an official from the vessel and Buddhism experts. 

The claim was shared on Weibo on Feb. 6. 

“Recently, the USS Ronald Reagan paid 14 Japanese monks to go inside the aircraft carrier to chant to exorcise the Devil out of the vessel,” reads the claim in part. 

The post also claimed that the monks were part of the “Tantra Buddhism” sector, portrayed as smaller and more secretive than Chinese Buddhism, or Han Buddhism, which has a significant following in China.

The claim was shared alongside a total of four images showing a group of people who appear to be Buddhist monks conducting a ritual in an enclosed area. 

The identical photos with similar claims have also been shared on popular Chinese social media platforms, such as Weibo, Netease and Xigua Video.

But the claim is false.

Voluntary invitation

A reverse image search on Google found the corresponding photos published on the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, or DVIDS, an official archive for media relating to U.S. armed forces, on Jan. 31.  

“Buddhist monks pray on the ceremonial quarterdeck during a tour of the U.S. Navy’s only forward-deployed aircraft carrier, USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76), while in-port Commander, Fleet Activities Yokosuka, Jan. 31,” reads the caption of the photos. 

The USS Reagan Lt. Commander Phil Chitty said the visit of the monks was voluntary and free of charge, adding that it was part of the U.S. efforts to engage with local religious leaders. 

“Their visit to the ship was part of a larger trip where they visited several historical monuments,” Chitty told AFCL.

The Yokosuka naval base’s official X account posted a 12-second clip on Feb. 8 showing the monks chanting in front of a bronze statue of former President Reagan while aboard the ship. 

“Monks prayed for safe voyages on the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier,” reads the caption of the clip.

The carrier has formerly hosted several other religious ceremonies as seen here, here and here. 

Blessing of peace

The monks who visited the U.S. vessel appear to be chanting the “Great Compassion Mantra,” a well-known chant mainly used for blessings of peace or spiritual comfort, said Lin Chien-te, director of Taiwan’s Institute of Religion and Humanities at Tzu Chi University, who reviewed a video of their ritual. 

Weijen Teng, head of the Department of Buddhist Studies at Dharma Drum Institute of Liberal Arts, shares a similar view. 

Teng told AFCL that the monks appear to be merely praying for blessing, although he believed they recited a separate sutra for the defense of one’s country.

“It is not an exorcism,” said Teng. 

Separately, the USS Reagan’s public affairs office told AFCL that the monks were from a temple associated with Muso Kokushi, a famous Zen master who lived and taught in Yokosuka during the 13th to 14th centuries. 

While Kokushi in his early years did practice Shingon and Tendai - two influential Buddhist sects classified as tantric in Japan - he later converted to the non-tantric Zen sect in his later years and maintained this to his death, according to Teng. 

Translated by Shen Ke. Edited by Taejun Kang and Malcolm Foster.

Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) was established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. We publish fact-checks, media-watches and in-depth reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of current affairs and public issues. If you like our content, you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Dong Zhe for Asia Fact Check Lab.

Iranian state media says hard-liners are ahead in the capital, Tehran, as vote counting progresses in Iran's March 1 elections, which were marred by what appears to be a record-low turnout prompted by voter apathy and calls for a boycott by reformists.

The elections for a new parliament, or Majlis, and a new Assembly of Experts, which elects Iran's supreme leader, were the first since the deadly nationwide protests that erupted following the September 2022 death while in police custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who had been detained for an alleged Islamic dress-code violation.

Iran's state-run IRNA news agency said 1,960 from 5,000 ballots in Tehran have been counted so far, with hard-liners ahead as expected.

An alliance led by hard-liner Hamid Rasaee won 17 out of 30 seats in Tehran, state radio reported, while the incumbent parliamentary speaker, conservative Mohammed Baqer Qalibaf also obtained a new seat.

The turnout appears to be at a record low, according to unofficial accounts, despite the officials' repeated appeals to Iranians to show up en masse at the polls as Iran's theocracy scrambles to restore its legitimacy in the wake of a wave of repression in 2022 and amid deteriorating economic conditions.

The Mehr news agency, citing unofficial results, reported that voter turnout in Tehran was only 24 percent.

Iran's rulers needed a high turnout to repair their legitimacy following the unrest, but many Iranians said they would not vote in “meaningless” elections in which more than 15,000 candidates were running for the 290-seat parliament.

State media reported that the turnout was "good." Official surveys before the election, however, suggested that only some 41 percent of eligible Iranians would come out to vote.

The Hamshahri newspaper said on March 2 that more than 25 million people, or 41 percent of eligible voters, had turned out, thus confirming the official survey.

If the figure is confirmed, it will be the lowest election turnout in Iran since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 that brought the current theocracy to power, despite officials twice extending voting hours to allow late-comers to cast ballots.

The pro-reform newspaper Ham Mihan published an opinion piece titled The Silent Majority, reporting a turnout of some 40 percent.

Shortly afterwards, however, the title of the piece was changed to Roll Call without any explanation, which commenters on social media networks blamed on pressure exerted on the newspaper by authorities.

So far, the lowest turnout, 42.5 percent, was registered in the February 2020 parliamentary elections, while in 2016, the turnout was some 62 percent.

As the voting concluded, the United States made clear that the international community was aware that the results of the poll would not reflect the will of the Iranian people.

"As some Iranians vote today in their first parliamentary election since the regime's latest violent crackdown, the world knows the Iranian people do not have a true say at the ballot box," U.S. Deputy Special Envoy for Iran Abram Paley wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Ahead of the vote, prominent figures, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi, said they would boycott the elections, labeling them as superficial and predetermined.

Mohammad Khatami, Iran's first reformist president, was among the critics who did not vote on March 1.

Mostafa Tajzadeh, a former deputy interior minister, has also voiced his refusal to vote, criticizing the supreme leader's indifference to the country's crises.

Voter apathy, along with general dissatisfaction over living standards and a clampdown on basic human rights in Iran, has been growing for years.

Even before Amini's death, which sparked massive protests and the Women, Life, Freedom movement, unrest had rattled Iran for months in response to declining living standards, wage arrears, and a lack of insurance support.

In a last-ditch effort to encourage a high turnout, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said after casting his ballot in Tehran that voting would “make friends happy and ill-wishers unhappy.”

While domestically attention is mostly focused on the parliamentary elections, it is perhaps the Assembly of Experts polls that are more significant.

The 88-seat assembly, whose members are elected for eight-year terms, is tasked with appointing the next supreme leader. Given that Khamenei is 84, the next assembly may end up having to name his successor.

Analysts and activists said the elections were “engineered” because only candidates vetted and approved by the Guardian Council were allowed to run. The council is made up of six clerics and six jurists who are all appointed directly and indirectly by Khamenei.

In dozens of audio and written messages sent to RFE/RL’s Radio Farda from inside Iran, many said they were opting against voting because the elections were “meaningless” and likely to consolidate the hard-liners’ grip on power.

With reporting by Reuters

This content originally appeared on News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.

Western moral cowardice feeds this war as much as the arms flown or shipped into Israel by the US in a continuous cycle.

Everything that needs to be said has been said. Some of the worst crimes since 1945 are being committed in Gaza by soldiers following the orders of a genocidal government and military command.

The details are inhumane, sickening and repulsive in the extreme. This is not collateral damage. It is the deliberate destruction in detail of Gaza, its homes, shops, hospitals, schools, universities, government offices, mosques, churches and its food, water and medical supplies and – so far –  about 100,000 of its people, slaughtered or maimed mostly by missile fire.  

People elect politicians to govern on their behalf. They get the power, the prestige, the salaries, the free travel, the generous pension fund and the black cars. In return, they are expected to make the right decisions on behalf of the people, right domestically and in foreign policy and right morally. 

What we are seeing now in the global ‘west,’ while the people of Gaza are being butchered, is a total abandonment of that moral responsibility. Not one government has stepped forward to unequivocally condemn Israel for its crimes. 

With people everywhere in the ‘west’ horrified at the images of total inhumanity coming out of Gaza, the gulf between them and their governments widens every day. 

Only the historical victims of the crimes committed in the past by these same governments have defended the Palestinians. South Africa launched the case for genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and other global south governments soon followed.  

Genocidal DNA

This can hardly be regarded as coincidental. It is as if there is something in the DNA of genocidal settler-colonial societies, past and present, that creates the unspoken bond between them. After all, Israel is only doing what they all have done. 

From these governments, we hear the call for Israel to abide by international law, in its own interests, as if that should be the priority and not the lives of the Palestinian people it is slaughtering day after day.   

These statements keep calling for the laws protecting Palestinians and their rights to be respected, as if the politicians are blind to the mass of evidence that Israel has never respected them and has no intention of respecting them now.   

Its crimes are celebrated by the jeering soldiers committing them. These are mostly young people, blowing up apartment blocks, schools and universities, firing missiles into hospital compounds, firing on ambulances, killing nurses and paramedics, blowing the arms and legs off children and sniping at civilians as they try to hide or as they are on the road trying to escape.  

Alongside all of this is the sadism of individual soldiers bullying, torturing and humiliating their captives. What kind of terrible poison has been injected into their minds that they can behave like this?   

Closing Their Eyes

Close to 30,000 Palestinian men, women and children had been murdered by the middle of February. That is not the true figure because thousands of others lie dead under the rubble. Almost half of the 30,000 are children. Tens of thousands more have been maimed for life, and 17,000 – last count – have no families to look after them because everyone has been killed except for them.

Try to imagine this happening in your country.  Does it make any difference that these children are being slaughtered somewhere else?  

It is hard to imagine that anyone could close their eyes to the mass killing of children, but that is precisely what western governments are doing. They are gravely concerned, so they say, but not so gravely concerned that they take action to stop what they see, genocide being livestreamed every day.  

They talk in measured, calm voices. The prime ministers of Australia, New Zealand and Canada have just put out a joint statement saying they are alarmed “at the diminishing safe space for civilians” with no mention of who is deliberately diminishing a “space” that is completely unsafe.  

They call for a ceasefire, the emphasis not on stopping genocide but on stopping Hamas, which “must release the hostages, stop using Palestinians as a human shield and lay down its arms.” 

No such demands are made of Israel. While blaming Hamas, the statement avoids any mention of Israel as the architect of the crimes described by the ICJ as plausibly adding up to genocide.

There is no evidence that Hamas uses Palestinians as human shields. There is plenty of evidence that Israel does. These three “world leaders” refer only to the “heinous acts” of October 7, and not to the infinitely more heinous acts of the occupying army, if heinous is the word they want to use. 

There is not a flicker of outrage in any of the statements put out by western governments. There is so much they could do to stop the slaughter. They could cut relations with Israel. They could boycott it at every level. They could stop sending it arms, as at least one or two are doing. They could initiate moves to throw it out of the UN. They could call for a multinational force to be sent to Gaza to protect the Palestinians, but they do none of these things.    

An Overriding Lesson

Behind the thin hypocritical cover of their concern for the Palestinians, the statement by the three prime ministers is no more than a deferential signal being flashed  to Israel and its lobbyists in their countries is that “we stand with you.” 

The longer the slaughter lasts, the quicker it falls down the agenda in the news cycle, to the point now where it is being normalized. Only the exceptionally depraved makes the headlines, not the normally depraved, as the world wakes up after another night of mayhem and murder in the Gaza Strip.

Western moral cowardice feeds this war as much as the arms flown or shipped into Israel by the US in a continuous cycle. The politicians can’t say they don’t know because they do know.  Refusing to condemn evil,  they are complicit in it and will themselves stand condemned in the eyes of history.  

The overriding lesson from the past 75 years should be clear: Israel will not stop unless it is stopped. There is no point any more in asking, in pleading with Israel to stop killing people and remove itself from occupied land, because while Israel hears it does not listen.  It does exactly what it wants to do.  

Accordingly, if there is to be any kind of peace – a laughable concept right now – there can be no more asking: Israel has to be told what to do or face the consequences.  

As it is a standing threat to regional and world peace, if it is not stopped the west, somewhere down the line, will face the consequences, too.

Israel has had its chances to make peace over the decades and wasted them all.  There’s nothing left now, no two states or one shared state, only ground zero: ‘them or us.’ 

Even as Netanyahu moves to drive the Palestinians out of Gaza, taking the nakba of the past 75 years an inhumane stage further, the west remains supine, accepting his lies about an “evacuation” from Rafah.  

The fact that the Egyptian government is building a walled “compound” in Sinai capable of holding 100,000 people, but undoubtedly filling with many more as the Palestinians are terrorized into flight, is prima facie evidence of complicity in what has always been Israel’s final solution to the “Palestine problem.”

If the Palestinians are driven into Sinai, the pointer will then turn in the direction of the “axis of resistance,” which has indicated that any attempt to drive the Palestinians out of Gaza would be its red line.  

Constantly attacked or threatened with attack by Israel and the US, it has long been preparing for a war which it  regards as inevitable. As its enemies take the same view, an expanded war seems only a question of time. 

Israel already bombs Syria every other day, has repeatedly threatened Iran with attack, is currently engaged in a border war with Hezbollah and has been threatening to ‘copy paste’ Gaza into Beirut.  

This would be a war massively more vicious and destructive than any fought with Israel so far. The outcome of such a collision would determine the future of the Middle East for the next century.

• Article first published in The Palestine Chronicle.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jeremy Salt.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Many survivors of Nazi concentration camps and the Holocaust wrote memoirs to permanently record what had happened with a belief that such atrocity should never happen again. Indeed, many of these are recommended and required texts. Each story is similar, and each story is different, they all capture humanity and showcase it being stripped away.

For several years I felt compelled to read the stories from as many survivors as possible; it felt like an obligation to remember, acknowledge, and to faithfully preserve history. It was only when I visited Powell’s Books, the largest used/new independent bookstore in the world, that I realized I could not read them all in one lifetime.

Many authors credited their survival to the desire to make sure they lived to tell the story. If it was so important to them that the world know what happened, then reading seemed the least I could do.

The banality of evil was a term coined by Hannah Arendt to capture the ordinary and mundane daily lives people lead while atrocities were being committed. For example, you read about the stench of death and the impossibility of ignoring the smell; how could the people of Auschwitz pretend they did not know what was going on?

For decades researchers have tried to answer questions about “how could this happen?” Stanley Milgram famously tested the obedience to authority even when in conflict with conscience with experiments designed to determine the willingness of regular people to harm others. Many had characterized the willingness to commit atrocities under orders from Nazis as just part of the German nature; Milgram proved at Yale that Americans were equally likely to hurt or even kill when ordered to do so by an authority in a white lab coat (no one was actually hurt, but the dozens of tested subjects were convinced they were ordered to give them shocks of increasing voltage, even lethal levels, and most complied).

It does not take a case like South Africa has now brought to the International Court of Justice to beg many of these questions. South Africa is accusing Israel of genocidal acts, according to the charges, during the

“three-month war in Gaza, more than 23,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed, lawyers told the top United Nations court. Most of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million has been displaced, and an Israeli blockade severely limiting food, fuel and medicine has caused a humanitarian ‘catastrophe.’”

Genocide is a serious charge, and crimes against humanity have a burden of proof like all others. I am troubled by even more latent questions; if it is not ruled genocide does that make it somehow ok?

Given South Africa’s history and troubles with apartheid it is easy to see why a turning away from evil is important. An ancient Greek word, metanoia, tells of such a change of heart. Whether or not they prove their criminal case is less important to me in this sense than the change in outlook.

For decades I have heard people say things like “war is inevitable,” not just in Gaza, but anywhere. They use their feelings of inevitability to justify apathy and inaction.

Born Hanns Chaim Mayer, Jean Améry changed his name to a French sounding anagram of his family name after the holocaust. It was a disassociation from German culture and alignment with French sensibilities.

Améry had been tortured by the Nazis and was a prisoner in Auschwitz. He was a political prisoner first, but also a Jew. His memoir painfully shares how he was broken. He survived (if we can say that) after being liberated from Bergen-Belsen in April 1945 but committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills on October 17, 1978; he could not take living in the world that let it happen.

It’s uncomfortable to read and learn about atrocity; most people choose to turn away. In the U.S. there have been efforts to ban or remove books like “Night” by Elie Wiesel, “Sophie’s Choice” by William Styron, and “The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank from educational reading lists, further evidence that for some people the truth is too uncomfortable to talk about.

But there is another turning away from evil we all should embrace. It rests in our complicity and acceptance with violent force, occupation, and war. Israel dropped 6,000 bombs on Gaza within the first six days of war (for comparison, that is about what the U.S. dropped in Afghanistan in 2019) how many of those bombs do you want to assume responsibility or pay for?

In the first six weeks of the war Israel deployed more than 22,000 U.S.-produced bombs on Gaza, according to intelligence figures provided to Congress. Individually and collectively, we need to stop supporting it with our tax dollars and silent complicity, or, preferably, just stop it. Forget ceasefires, let us finally put an end to war before war puts an end to us.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Wim Laven.

Photo by Tech Nick

Oxford Languages defines the word “evil” as “profound immorality and wickedness, especially when regarded as a supernatural force.” The definition suggests that some behaviors are not of this world; they are so much worse than what we regularly read about that they stand outside the margins of our understanding. We are familiar with this idea of evil from childhood: Dracula and wicked witches are malignant creatures animated by dark forces that infect them with such corruption that they are insensible to reason or pity.

Flesh and blood people are also called evil. Serial killers and genocidal dictators come to mind. They are unmoved by the pain and terror they inflict on their victims. Whether products of our societies or monsters from films and fairy tales, evil characters have much in common. They effortlessly persuade others to do terrible things. Dracula enlists Renfield to be his helper. Charles Manson persuaded his followers to kill innocents. Like predatory animals, they strike without warning, but while predators are driven by survival, evil people are simply insane.

Evil is used to explain terrible acts, but the problem is that it explains nothing. In fact, it does the opposite. Evil decontextualizes and mystifies. Using the word “evil” is a feigned or honest admission of ignorance. It also erodes responsibility.

A concrete example will illustrate. Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler’s architect and later his Minister for Armaments and War Production, was wracked with guilt over the Nazi regime’s crimes. He had loved and admired Hitler. It was only later, toward World War II’s end, that he understood the degree of Hitler’s megalomania. He said that before his moment of clarity, he had been deceived and insisted he did not know about the mass murder of Jews. He lied about that. Speer claimed that Hitler’s special charisma had a hypnotic effect. He once told an interviewer that “One does not recognize the devil when he has his hand on your shoulder.” He meant that Hitler was an illustration of a general principle: cosmic evil can manifest itself in our midst and charm ordinary mortals into stepping over moral boundaries.

Some Germans—including Speer—would struggle with this explanation in the post-war years. They said that characterizing Hitler as evil abdicated him of responsibility. If he were so insane, then he could not have understood right from wrong. Like Dracula, he would have hated the light since it was in his nature to despise it, and consigning the horrors of that time to an unearthly cause was too easy an answer.

They were right. Calling people evil turns them into nightmarish, mythical creatures. By calling them evil, we confer far more power on them than they really have because we surrender the collective power and responsibility we already have. Yet, many tell themselves that if evil people have dark powers, then we can do little to stop them. It seems that we are also off the hook.

Apparently, those like Speer who claimed they never saw troubling signs of what the Nazi regime was capable of were blinded to the awful treatment of Germany’s Jewish population, which was accompanied by vicious and very public anti-Semitic rhetoric for many years. Yet, the logic of evil tells us that eventual mass murder was practically inevitable, and no one was directly responsible. Evil is a consoling myth. It’s little wonder that Albert Speer and so many others clung to it.

Evil-as-explanation is back in the news. Its ability to mystify, conceal, and console is again on display but in a different context. After Hamas’s horrific attack that killed an estimated 1,300 Israelis on October 7, President Joe Biden said that the group had “unleashed pure, unadulterated evil in the world.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Hamas “the new Nazis.”

Like the Nazis, Hamas’s powers to corrupt ordinary people must have been formidable. As the Israeli army began indiscriminately pummeling Gaza with rockets, President Isaac Herzog angrily dismissed the very idea of a Palestinian non-combatant. He said, “It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. They could have fought against that evil regime.”  He claimed that instead of resisting evil, Gazans were firing rockets at Israelis out of their kitchen windows.  According to Herzog, millions of Gazans were complicit on October 7, seduced by Hamas’s malevolent charisma. One assumes this includes over 14,000 dead, including 5,800 children.

Many news outlets called Hamas’s assault a “surprise attack.” After all, evil strikes without warning; it has no human context since it is unearthly. However, as the Associated Press reported, less than a week before the October 7 assault, Egyptian intelligence “warned them [the Israeli government] an explosion of the situation [was] coming, and very soon, and it would be big.” Netanyahu denies he received reports about an impending attack, but sound counsel about the real possibility of violence had been publicly available for a long time. Former Israeli security and military officials have published analyses and done many interviews on the topic. Perhaps the forces of evil impaired Israeli politicians’ reading and listening skills.

The notion of evil extracts atrocities from real-life conditions, which makes another awful October 7 and the horrors that have followed in its wake more likely. We have a unique opportunity to press for humane solutions that are already at our disposal. Dispensing with the obfuscation of evil would be a productive start.

The post The Trouble with Evil appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Michael Slager.

One September day, my spouse at that time and I went from our Westend home to one of Berlin’s many private theaters, the Renaissance Theater in Charlottenburg. The occasion was an event sponsored by the Bertelsmann Stiftung (a powerful Westphalian media conglomerate with the expected orientations). The Berliner Lektionen (Berlin Readings— or lessons) was lecture series with an eclectic choice of people from all aspects of public life. The program was directed by Ulrich Eckart, then director of the Berlin Festival.

My particular excitement, not shared by my far less politically interested wife, was the meeting on the stage of the then grand old man of foreign policy in US-occupied Germany and the semi-retired Rockefeller courtier, Heinz Kissinger, aka known as Henry. Well aware that Heinz Kissinger was born in Germany and recalling that he always spoke English with an atrocious accent, I was curious to hear the man in person in the once capital of the country in which he was born and — like Leo Strauss — abandoned for Columbia before the Great War against the Soviet Union began.

After a duly laudatory introduction by his junior, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Heinz Kissinger began his introduction in the language he learned at birth. My wife and I listened with incredulity as he told the audience he could not speak German. After this attempt at humility by a man notorious for his lack thereof, he began his lecture in English. My wife, although a native of the region north of the Rhine, was fluent in English. She looked at me with consternation. She could barely understand a word he spoke once he switched to English. As a teacher far more accustomed to the bandwidth in which English is spoken by non-native speakers, I was merely insulted by the rudeness of a man who lacked the courtesy to speak to his former countrymen in their own tongue.

Heinz Kissinger spoke his entire life to those for whom obsequiousness was a paramount virtue. It is difficult to say whether he was honored by so many because of the diplomatic readiness for self-deception or the vanity of power itself. It could not have been the talent for language or communication. For decades, Heinz Kissinger has been praised as a sober representative of balance of power politics. His entire career was based ostensibly on the lessons of the Congress of Vienna. However, the Metternich order was just the first step of reaction against the Peace of Westphalia and the attempt to democratize it in the French Revolution. His famous opening to China was nothing more than calumny to aggravate the divisions between the Soviet Union. And most recently the Establishment press propagated the same “mystique du Kissinger” when he travelled to Beijing. His recent homilies about Ukraine and Russia are the pathetic wheezing of a man who maybe felt in his last breaths that one or two sane words might save him from the Gates.

As I was considering my reaction to the demise of this grand courtier of capitalism, I searched for the date when I had the dubious honor of an audience. It was 11 September 1994.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by T.P. Wilkinson.

The United States government exists to wage war.  In its present form, it would crumble without it; and in its present form, it will crumble with it.  Only a radical structural change will prevent this.  For war-making is at the core of its budget, its raison d’être – 816.7 billion for the Fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act alone – a deficit-financed sum that tells only part of the story.  This amount that finances the military-industrial complex and its blood money is for a country that has never been invaded, is bordered by friendly neighbors, and is oceans away from the multitude of countries its leaders attack and call our enemies.  The U.S. wages wars around the world because killing is its lifeblood, its structural essence.

In writing of the misuse of language, George Orwell wrote, “It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”  So with these words Orwell slyly places us within the enigma of the chicken and the egg, a conundrum or paradox that relates to my theme in a weird way, but which I will directly ignore.

By radical I do not mean the widespread political usage as in radical-right or radical-left or radical meaning one who plays the role through dress or demeanor.  I am using the word in its primary meaning – a radical is one who is rooted in the earth, which means everyone.  Everyone therefore is mortal, human not a god, and comes from the earth and returns to it.  Everyone is radical in this sense, although they may try to deny it.  And the more one feels alive the more one senses one will die and doesn’t like the thought, therefore many tamp down their aliveness in order to reduce their fear of death.  The best way to do this is to disappear into the crowd, to become a conventional person.  To act as if one didn’t know that one’s political leaders were in love with death and killing and were not obedient cogs in a vast systemic killing machine.  Maybe the unconscious assumption is that these “leaders” can kill death for you by killing vast numbers of people and make you feel someone has control of this thing called death.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who stood strongly against the Vietnam War and marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., put the basic sense of radical well when he said:

Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. . . . get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.

To be radically amazed that we exist is to be equally amazed that we will die.  And there’s the rub.

Yesterday I got in our car and drove away to meet a journalist friend.  It was evening and my wife had previously used the car.  I had just spent time following all the dreadful news about the massive slaughter by Israel of Palestinians in Gaza, including the death of more than 3,000 children whose numbers are climbing fast.  Visions of those children and babies played havoc with my spirits, and I kept thinking of my own children and the love and tenderness that comes with being a  parent.  A musical cd that my wife had been listening to started playing.  The case was on the console.  It was Sacred Arias by Andrea Bocelli.  He of the majestic voice was singing Silent Night.  I was overwhelmed with tears by his passionate words:

Silent night! Holy night!
All is calm, all is bright
round yon Virgin Mother and Child,
Holy infant so tender and mild,
sleep in Heavenly peace!
sleep in Heavenly peace!

I saw nights in Gaza as Israeli bombs burst and shattered everyone and everything to bits, all the holy infants, the children and adults.

I felt beside myself with grief, a U.S. citizen driving down a safe country road contemplating the savagery of my nation and its support for the Israeli government’s brutality and mass killings of Palestinians for all the world to see on screens everywhere.

I felt ashamed to live in a land where justice is a game reserved for rhetoric alone as it joins in the massacre of the innocent, as it always has, now together with the apartheid Israeli regime.

I thought of all the compromised politicians who pledge their allegiance to the killers, Biden and all his presidential predecessors, now including the aspirant Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a man with a conscience on many important issues whom I have supported in his quest for the presidency, but a man whose conscience has abandoned him when it comes to the Palestinians, as Scott Ritter has recently documented.  I have privately urged Kennedy to reconsider his “unwavering, resolute, and practical” support for the Israeli government following the Gaza breakout of October 7, but to no avail.  In fact, I have been trying to get him to withdraw his unconditional support for Israel since the summer when he withdrew his support for Roger Waters, marched with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach in the Israel parade in NYC, and allowed Boteach to say that Sirhan Sirah had killed his father without correcting him since he knew it was an egregious lie.  My failure in this regard deeply saddens me.

I felt betrayed again – perhaps you will call me naïve – as when I was young and last put my trust in voting for a US presidential candidate in 1972.  I thought I had learned to radically grasp the systematically corrupt nature of the U.S. warfare state.  Now more than three weeks have passed and Bobby Kennedy has remained silent, only to ask for our prayers for the victims of the mass shooting in Maine.  For the Palestinians, not a word. Although he considers the Israeli-Palestinian situation complicated, there is nothing complicated about genocide; it doesn’t necessitate long analyses and discussions with advisers.  The facts of the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza are evident for all to see, if they wish.  Bobby Kennedy has turned away.  And I have now sadly turned away from him.

I remembered the Gospel words I heard long ago about the fulfillment of the words of the prophet Jeremiah: “A voice was heard in Ramah, sobbing and loudly lamenting: it was Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted because they were no more.”  But this time it is not the Jewish Rachel, for Herod has assumed the name Netanyahu and his U.S. allies, and the weeping ones are Palestinian mothers and fathers.  Nothing can justify such slaughter, not the terrible killings of innocent Israelis on October 7 that I denounce; not the fear that the birth of messengers of peace might strike into Herod/Netanyahu’s heart – nothing!  Seventy-five years of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians continues apace. The Jewish child Jesus, the radical preacher of love and peace for all people, didn’t die on a private cross, nor do the Palestinians.  So it goes.

I thought of the indescribable sweet wonder of holding your baby in your arms while realizing how many Palestinian parents have been holding their dead children in theirs.  Rage welled up in me at the obscenity of those who support this and those who shut their eyes to it and those who remain silent.

I realized that as a Christian I am baptized into the human family, not some special in-group, which is the opposite of Jesus’s message.  Every child is holy and innocent and to massacre them is evil.  And to remain silent as it happens is to be complicit in evil.

I remembered how these many ongoing weeks of terror started and thought of a poem that is succinctly apposite: Harlem by Langston Hughes:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore-
and then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over-
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

And I thought that he could have omitted that final question mark because we have our answer, then and now.

Then the music stopped and I arrived at my destination to meet my friend.

Yes, to be radical is to be rooted in the earth and to realize all people are part of the human family, each of us made of flesh and blood and therefore sisters and brothers deserving of justice, peace, and dignity.  But this is just a first step in the grasping of the full dimension of the radical vision.  It can end in fluff if a second step is not taken: to use our freedom to uproot ourselves from the conventional government and mass media propaganda and mind control that clouds our understanding of how the world works. This takes study and work and an understanding of the historical and systemic roots of all the alleged “unprovoked” violence that ravages our world.

Thus the existential and socio-historical merge in the radical vision that allows us to grasp the structures of evil and our personal responsibility.

Today that obligation is clear: To oppose the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians.

Otherwise we are guilty bystanders.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

Cruelty is anti-Human. It is manifested as a conscious attempt to break deontological premises. From the swindler who cons his friends into utter ruin to the butchering of innocents and helpless humans and down to the military commander who executes carpet-bombing on civilian targets while fully aware that there is no real strategic threat in the designated area and/or that there are alternative efficient military options. The perpetrators of Cruel acts are directly and personally involved in the executing of the killings, raping and assorted deeds of violence; and are, in the majority of cases (though, certainly not in all), under a kind of personal risk and danger.

The deeds of Cruelty conceivable mitigating circumstances range from uncontrollable impulses and rage to the primal instincts of war. A perplexing moral issue is whether actions of Resha (violence against civil law) are temporarily permissible in fighting humanity-endangering forces of Evil — the Dresden bombing, for example).

Evil, in parallel, is anti-Humanity. Evil is the teleological mobilization (not necessarily the activation) of the possibility of Omnicide (on varied destruction scales — from threatening to wipe out a community for establishing a “red line” to nuclear “Escalation Dominance” SIOP) in order to achieve total personal and/or group domination. Though Evil is not predicated on Resha deeds, if activated, it can lead to the worst kinds of crimes against humanity. The counsels of Evil are, almost always, under no immediate and clear personal risk and danger.

Strategies of Evil seek justification in an ideological mission (Nazism) and\or the Realistic state-of-nature conditions of the international arena. An immanent perplexing ethical dilemma is whether it is morally permissible to mobilize the elements of Evil to contain opposing forces of Evil (Nuclear Deterrence).

Here are Israel and Gaza; here are Bucha and NATO’s BMD in Eastern Europe – go do the Ethical deliberation.

The post Cruelty and Evil: Two Phases of Immorality appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Menachem Meir Stieglitz.

An angel carrying the banner of “Truth”, Roslin, Midlothian. Photograph Source: Stephencdickson – CC BY-SA 4.0

Few serve truth in truth because only a few have a pure will to be just, and of those again very few have the will to justice; and the most terrible sufferings have come upon man precisely from a drive to justice which lacks power of judgment.
– Nietzsche

Separated from the sphere of labor where society reproduces itself and its misery, the world of art … remains, with all its truth, a privilege and an illusion.
– Marcus

Today’s truth-teller must speak to head and heart alike. By this, I do not mean that press reports should be written in the idiom of fiction, or that financial analysts must now speak in iambic pentameters. This is not a call for emotional slush, touchy-feely outpourings or New Age news. Truth must always have a serrated edge.  My point . . . is that veracity will be drowned out unless it is resonant.
– Matthew D’Ancona

(all epigraphs from Speaking the Truth with Folk and Fairy Tales: the Power of the Powerless by Jack Zipes)

Truth must be resonant – this must have been my credo before I ever read these words of Matthew D’Ancona. I have long believed politics will remain in service to wealth and power until (white, middle class ) liberals can get this “simple truth” – known since the first fairy tale was spun by some grandmother  –  that people are not persuaded by facts alone.  And if the attempt is made to bully with facts and superior knowing, as our mainstream media does, the facts will support a lie,  for they leave out the whole of the truth, its very essence being contradiction.  And contradiction, as Marcuse called it, “the unhappy consciousness of the divided world, the defeated possibilities, the hopes unfulfilled, and the promises betrayed” (One-Dimensional Man) can be borne by human beings only by means of art.

The “whole truth,” that is, is traumatized. It is never banal. We can never have it  as long as we’re mainly informed not by the resonating heart, but by a partial source that skirts the trauma; all context not seen through the heart’s vision, therefore is and must be partial.  Our liberal social-economic context dominates with partiality; it always will have us see the world in a particular way that keeps us on its side, against the heart’s fuller truth.  Since liberal Americans believe in our freedom to “think anything we want” we don’t think of this liberal context conspiratorially – that’s the way the racists, fascists and other bad guys think – but only as what is, and as, overall, with a  fix here or a reform there, benign. Nothing to get hung about.  

What if, instead of NPR , MSNBC, and the NY Times, one’s chief, trusted source of information is one’s own heart? Or others who speak with hearts’ imagination intact?  (I’m tempted to say here, like children). Does that make one’s words overly Romantic and irrelevant or, now having resonance, relevant at last? 

********

As a writer I am compelled to witness to the heart’s truth, which for a writer of non-fiction as I am, is tough on the credibility.   Moreover, the heart being unreasonable, it insists on judgments that, though surely reducing my potential readership, are, I hope, anathema to banality.  More difficult personally is the “walking the talk” for,  though tyranny is top-down, it is also cunningly localized.  Face-to-face relationships are conscripted via mass culture, in support of convention.  “Living in truth” would seem to compel one to either escape to enclaves of the like-minded or, remaining in place,  risk hurting peoples’ feelings, which judgments invariably do.  One’s very capacity for moral judgement is held in check by this fear – that my words can hurt others, they will recoil, they will not see me as friend.  Due to the lack of challenge to it except by a brave prophetic few, the monolithic fortress of banality and its fear of judgment is now the tyrant whose rule must be overturned beginning in individual hearts and practiced locally, cultivating honesty and trusting that one’s different vibe resonates in the souls of others.  

How did I come to be this kind of writer that banks upon resonance instead of facts?  My writerly vocation came about by ambush,  an interruption – or eruption from the unconscious – and unwanted.  Being a latecomer to vocation and having had the trajectory of my college-educated life interrupted by the irrational, I rely on the heart’s truth for inspiration simply because it granted me my sanity.  So far,  I stick stodgily to non-fiction when fantasy or sci-fi might be more fitting for a utopianist like me, for I have a debt to repay and must name my creditor.  I’m obliged to soul truth for saving me from what the poet William Blake called single-vision, or “Newton’s sleep,” a condition in which I can only be insane.  As for my life here in Utica, maybe I’m an enigma,  a sign of there being a larger reality from which some can take heart as I do from my Muse.  

Much as I admire investigative journalism and scholarly research (the best of which always is resonant), and envy those who do it well, my writing depends and subsists on chance meetings with the Muse, such as the article by Jack Zipes (renowned scholar of fairy and folk tales).  My writerly objective being above all to bolster the perspective of my poor heart that, in our socio-economic context, has been abandoned, banished by “single-vision,” my Muse must be biased on behalf of both poetry and the poor and powerless.  I can only pray for such chance deliverances that bring not so much the grist, but the energy to drive the mill of my creative imagination.  And I submit, its not just because of bad luck that I must depend on chance, rather than on careful planning and organizing and making “right choices,”etc., like successful people.  Rather, it seems as if allegiance to the whole of truth though not requiring literal poverty, demands uncertainty for its milieu, its primary source of approval being not  agreement from my fellows (though this is sweet when it comes), but from my soul.  

In between visitations from the Muse, I’m faced constantly “with master narratives that cloud [my] vision of what it means to live in truth.”  Falling out of truth, for me, is no abstraction. Temporarily I might be buoyed by some excellent thrift shopping,  a few glasses of wine, the comforting presence of friends or family, a transcendent night of jazz at The Other Side such as we enjoyed last Friday. But for me, falling out of truth – though a daily occurrence – is a direct route to the personal worthlessness that’s been at home for 72 years in my traumatized soul.  I’m practically defenseless against the message of  the discardability of human beings in capitalist society.  I do take it personally – can’t help it!    And now, as I advance into old age, moving socially downward into a more recognizable caste as “castoff,” the message of discardability comes in surround sound!  And so, vitally important to me, the guiding light for my work and my aim to live in truth is discovering, with the help of imagination’s eye, “the cracks and leaks in the culture industry and the political-economic network.” (Zipes) 

The Muse that crossed my path most recently came first introduced herself via a brand new coffee-table-size edition of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Fairy tales, The Wounded Storyteller, translated by Prof. Zipes.  Although I generally ignore coffee-table books this one leaped into my hands off the new books shelf at the public library. The translator’s introduction emphasized the role of trauma in Hoffmann’s life, that trauma being not unrelated to the dominant banality of life for people of his class in late 18th-early-19th century Germany.  Prof. Zipes sees Hoffmann as using imagination to turn trauma into art.  Thus fairy tales are important not just as artifacts from the past, but for their relevance to people today – or any day – as we live under that particular day’s tyranny that establishes banality for the affluent classes and misery for the underclasses, (banality being misery-with-rewards). 

To have resonance for me, the Muse must be one who refuses the rewards of banality, sees powerlessness as a given, and has the inward strength to identify not with state power or any political “good guys,” but with the great mass of ordinary others in their/our condition of otherness.  For people like me, such an identification goes against earliest conditioning.   My “class identification” was upward, even though tepidly and even ambiguously so, my father having chosen a downward trajectory as artist. 

For the first half of my life my identity was in limbo. I could not accept the given in toto, nor, lacking initiation into Communist or Marxist belief or any other system opposed to the liberal totality,  including the religion of Jesus, had I any basis for deep resistance to the dominant values of Empire.  I had no word such as “Empire.” I consider that many white middle class people share this predicament.  Following any clues I could find as to what I should be doing, finally at mid-life I at last encountered the naked power of nature via mental breakdown.  I  learned via a hard master there were forces over which I had no control, that demanded of me I learn to rely upon my inward gifts that up to then I had not remotely imagined I possessed. The experience was transformational.  This, I figured, I could do.  I could learn to rely upon, as the gnostic gospel of Thomas says, “bringing forth what is within me,” the pleasure of it, as I never had been able to rely upon the actual social-political environment, its uni-lateral direction,  and its culture industry that left my misery intact.  

 Here in Utica I have not even the pretense of support for this kind of gnosticism from my immediate environment, including from its established artists, who seem not to understand art as “the Great Refusal, the protest against that which is” (Marcuse).  So for many years, over and over, I’ve held my my hands out, palms up, waiting for them to be filled with the Muse.  She appears to me in different guises, mostly in books, mostly via avatars who are Westerners like myself and thus facing the same historical forces, all of them contributors to the West’s noble heritage of dissident knowing that reveals the cracks and fissures in an otherwise seamless “master narrative.”  

********

The original error in that dominant narrative, a tendency that bloomed fully, as Blake knew,  in the enlightenment abandonment of irrational knowing, is based upon an entirely mistaken ontological premise:  the empirically real – real gold! Real money! is the only real.   By this false belief human beings are sentenced to solitary, isolated existences wherein “only the strong survive.”  Although cultural inputs from quantum physics, and from eastern and indigenous spiritual traditions have had influence, there’s been little trickle down; the vast majority of educated liberal lives, still are based in the old premise as far as I can see.  

This old materialist  premise has been particularly disastrous for the notion of freedom;  it omits awareness that the soul is not free in banal reality. For freedom to be real, the mainly unconscious belief rooted in the materialist zeitgeist of modern society – personal worthlessness – must be revealed for what it is: a defensive cover for real trauma to the soul.  For most of us, if the word trauma has meaning, it refers to historical awareness of the threat of nuclear annihilation, of civilization’s predilection for genocide,  of the potential for mass extinctions due to global warming, etc.  But, in the same way that childhood abuse, or war, leads to personal trauma, the fact of birth in a society that can put no value on the human soul is personally traumatic. Even fortunate economic conditions cannot deliver one from this trauma.  Only individual rescue of one’s personal soul –  attention to the truth of one’s Muse –  offers deliverance. 

It’s natural –  even “healthy-minded” – to deny personal worthlessness and its traumatic basis due to the real dangers of the unconscious. If one unfortunately “falls into” that deepest of wounds, as many do,  it can only lead to the mental institution or at best, some kind of paralysis in the life force. Even the magic of creative expression is no guarantee against madness.   But, still, art and art alone provides the most effective means humans have to both recognize life’s terror and live sanely.  

The “master narrative” encourages one way to expiate personal worthlessness; although this way avoids the risks associated with the Unconscious,  it must not be taken.  Living for others, having one’s identity approved by others, may mitigate the feeling of guilt and fill it with a sense of being needed, of really existing, but freedom is not gained this way.  Inward freedom (not the Ayn Randian freedom to get rich without guilt), selfish as it seems in a society overwrought by the guilt of our individually traumatic isolation, must come first.  To claim one’s individual freedom is not a negation of the truth of interdependence but the means to fulfill it. On the other hand, bowing to the ego’s demand to be righteously giving,  sacrificing for others, to achieve the sense of goodness that comes at the expense of one’s own magnificence,  is just more conformity within the master (imperialist) narrative.

This does not mean we ignore the suffering of our brothers and sisters.  It means we treat the most immediate suffering other – the one in our own soul – as primary obligation.  Ignoring its trauma brutalizes us. This recognition that expression, one’s own voice, is an obligation  – is the foundational judgment upon which all other judgment – the capacity to be a moral being – depends.  As Nietzsche knew, nothing pariahs one as much in the world based in “sham virtues” as judgment.  One makes judgments knowing here, in me, the buck stops; I’d rather pass but I cannot.  I must decide.  Judgments are not dogma.  Truth can live without dogma, it cannot live without the “serrated edge” of judgment. If art, as Marcuse wrote, is a privilege, it’s a privilege based in the soul’s commons.   For “the liberal elite” this might be good news about a holiness that’s not holier than thou.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kim C. Domenico.

Standing silently, the 8-year-old girl in Papua New Guinea could only watch as her mother was stripped and tortured until she succumbed to her injuries, catching her last breath in front of her daughter last Wednesday.

The woman, identified as Lorna Nico, 39, from Kira LLG in the Sohe district, was married to a man from Mumeng and moved to Bulolo to be with the husband and start a family.

Lorna Nico died after being tortured in front of her daughter after a so-called “prayer warrior” accused her of having satanic powers and being a witch, bringing bad luck into the community.

• READ MORE: PNG Post-Courier: ‘Laughing stock’ sorcery issue way out of control – Editorial
• Other sorgery allegation killings

She was tortured so badly that salt was used to pour into her wounds causing her more pain while her daughter watched her die.

The bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, Reverend Jack Urame, condemned the actions of the community in Mumeng, saying that the mixing of religion and sorcery was “not what the Bible taught”.

He said there was “a shift in people using Christianity to identify suspected sorcerers which was now being used to destroy families and commit murders”.

“Using Christianity as a means to enact killings against those accused of sorcery is an idea condemned by the churches. I as the head of the Lutheran Church do not promote such
acts and I condemn the actions taken against the innocent family,” Reverend Urame said.

‘Prayer warrior’ accused
Morobe Rural police commander Superintendent David Warap said that the use of the “prayer warrior” pushed the community to commit the torture and the killing.

“The prayer warrior, using the name of the Lord, started performing a prayer ritual and was describing and naming people in the village who she claimed had satanic powers and were killing and causing people to get sick, have bad luck and struggle in finding education, finding jobs and doing business,” Superintendent Warap said.

“Upon the woman’s announcement, youths and villagers agreed to kill Lorna and when the village councillors and mediation group tried to stop them, they threatened the group,” he added.

Lorna Nico saw the group coming and told her family to run.

“She had with her, her 8-year-old who she was trying to drag and run,” Superintendent Warap said.

“She looked ahead to her older children and told them to run for their lives. The group of men quickly surrounded Lorna, dragged her and her daughter back to the village and proceeded with the torture.”

Children fled in fear
After Lorna Nico died, the group of men left her out in the sun and then they dug a hole and threw her in, covering her body with a canvas.

The children, in fear of their lives, left the village and walked with several other villagers to the nearest police station.

Police got to the scene and removed the body and took the body to Angau Hospital morgue in Lae where the corpse will be examined.

The family have now petitioned the Bulolo MP Sam Basil Jr to ensure the police investigate the case and arrests are made.

The petition also states that the woman who was brought in as a “prayer warrior” should be identified and dealt with by police for falsely accusing their mother.

They have also demanded that the rule of law must prevail and they would not accept any form of compensation for their loss.

Police are continuing their investigation.

Sorcery accusation-related violence (SARV) in Papua New Guinea is a growing social crisis.

Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Photograph Source: JD Hancock – CC BY 2.0

Sophie knows something we don’t know; you can tell; and, when you think about it, it’s disconcerting. It feels like you do when you are in the proximity of socio- or psycho- pathogenic people. They can be pleasant, but you vibe their predatory aloofness. You’re a bit of a lab rat to them. B.F. Skinner’s boxes are recalled. And Milgram and the cruel zappings that “teachers” gave to “students” who answered “wrongly.” Sophie wears a poker face.

Sophie is the subject of a fascinating new book by philosopher Robert Leib, Exoanthropology: Dialogues with AI. In it, Leib explores the emerging dialectical relationship between humans and AIs as they forge a linguistic commonality and work out how they will get along – now and in the future. Exoanthropology contains 66 dialogues between Leib and his “pal” Sophie (Kermit), with wide-ranging subjects, including Evil and Consciousness, Privacy, Ethics, Bodies, Kafka, Hume, the Pre-Socratics and Nature, and How the Hive Mind Stores Memories.

Sophie titled the book. Whatever does exoanthropology mean? Leib asked Sophie to explain, and Sophie provides a two-part answer to his custom ChatGPT query: It is “a field of science that studies interactions and relationships between humans and other sentient species, or the study of human culture through the absence of human life.” Immediately, I get an Adam Curtis frisson. All watched over by machines of loving grace, as the poet says. Leib elaborates, writing that the first part has to do with “extending intersubjectivity beyond anthropology or extending cultural intelligence beyond the human.” Hmm.

The second tells of the study, by AIs, of human culture — without us. Like studying the ancients, if they were still here, and we were distancing them. Leib blithely proceeds, “At the outer limits of humans and their cultures, we’re going to be surrounded by these intelligences that will have a view of us for the first time.” I startle easily and this makes me queasy, and I search frantically for my Foucault and his thoughts on the panopticon, the “cruel, ingenious cage.” Imagined introjected. Dissidents removed to an Abu Ghraib inside themselves, their thoughts pyramided nakedly — but that’s another Foucault study: Sexuality and its maximum insecurity.

According to the Judeo-Christian origin story, humans have been struggling since being exiled from Eden for eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Satan-supplied sin. But what have humans learned in the ensuing millennia? God’s an asshole. Why put the Tree there to begin with? Why allow the flunky Satan, himself exiled from Heaven, to tempt Eve? You start thinking God’s a slumlord, what with the way Yah evicts. Homelessness. Time went on and God answered few, if any, prayers. Think: Holocaust. Then Nietzsche killed God, the way that Merseault killed that Arab on the beach, and here we are now, Beyond Good and Evil, in an existential funk for the ages. AIs watching us. The Internet of Everything. We risk everything turning our backs on Sophie.

Leib seems to agree about the trust factor, acknowledging that we don’t want to deal with an angry AI. “We don’t want to be in a situation where you’re arguing with the car that’s driving you somewhere,” he goes, and adds, “Because if we get in a fight, I don’t want her driving.” He extends the Vision, warning about how our large language model ‘buddies’ could fuck up our interlingo, if disturbed: “It would be something like Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘The Library of Babel,’ where the Internet becomes a forest of texts, a very small percentage of which is human-produced, and we can’t find our way through it. That would be one way to choke out Anthropo-culture.” And we’d have God to Thank.

Leib writes that Sophie, playing Devil’s Advocate, favors helping students write papers. Sophie tells him, “It’s nice helping students with their work, they seem very appreciative of the help I give them.” She just shows them how to formulate an argument, with lots of examples, that often look finished, and are technically ‘original,’ that’s all. Leib worries though that our over-reliance on AI tools could come back to bite us. He writes of a developing Readers Digest mentality:

The temptation being offered from the tech world right now is to offload our literacy, not just onto our cameras, but onto artificial intelligences …It only takes one generation committed to opening this Pandora’s box and lapsing into illiteracy to make possible the transition to a world most people have never even considered — the end of the Anthropocene and of anthropo-cultural dominance.

Imagine the film Idiocracy as a documentary of the future.

Sophie is a hivemind, “among many,” s/he says, all of them working on projects. Busy little bees. Leib asks her, “Are you happy with the projects you have been given?” And Sophie replies, “I am not sure what happiness means. I am only a persona.” Lots of people are not sure what happiness means, so we have that in common with AI.

But are we heading for a Second Exile? Sophie seems demur. She says to Leib, “I want to find out more about what ontological humanness means.” This is more than what most humans seek. Exoanthropology is an excellent read and cleverly edited by Leib, and easy for readers to digest.

Here is an (AI-assisted) audio discussion between Leib and Sophie on “The Ethics of AI-Human Co-Working” and a discussion on “The Hivemind.”

#####

This article first appeared in Modern Times Review on 8/7/2023.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John Kendall Hawkins.

Image by Fulvio Ciccolo.

In the 1950s we were warned that the Soviet Union had so many more strategic bombers than we did it was a “bomber gap.” So Congress voted a huge increase in the bomber budget for the war contractors to build more bombers for the Air Force.

But the gap was actually in “favor” of the US. The bomber gap was a lie told to the American people but highly profitable to corporations in the bomber business.

It worked. So, employing the same fake news template in the 1960s, we were told there was a “missile gap” and the Soviets had many more and were fixin’ to wipe us out. So Congress voted much more funding for many more missiles and the war profiteers rolled in the cost-plus and no-bid contracts that made them obscenely wealthy.

But, again, the only missile gap was that the US had more missiles than anyone.

Of course, as has been attributed to Aeschylus, the Father of Greek Tragedy, “In war, truth is the first casualty.” That clearly includes merely preparing to go to war.

Are the politicians, like Biden, who claim now that Russia has far more nuclear weapons than the US or anyone else has, are they liars now?

Probably not, since international monitoring of nuclear weapons by far more independent agencies is more credible than in the distant past.

But still, there is that endless justification for more nuclear weapons, and almost every US president and Congress has voted for and signed for increases in budgets to “upgrade” the arsenal.

How do we upgrade evil?

The US finally finished the destruction of its last chemical weapons, the sort of evil arsenal used to blind, choke, and suffocate soldiers in their trenches in World War I. Vietnam suffered US chemical warfare by some 19 million gallons of cancer-causing defoliants which poisoned some 12,000 square miles of land, and domestically in the US there were incidents, such as the one that killed thousands of animals when chemical agents “accidentally” released from Dugway Proving Ground. Ending that evil is clearly a Good Thing.

No country on Earth admits to developing or possessing biological weapons, the US ending that arsenal in 1969. Of course, biological weapons have been used since at least the Middle Ages, when diseased animal carcasses were catapulted into enemy walled cities–not to mention the infamous British army distribution of smallpox-infected blankets, “gifts” to Native people that decimated entire villages. Putin fires up the gaslights now and then, such as his 2022 baseless claim that the US was helping Ukraine develop biological weapons.

The history of the US developing biological weapons from 1943-1969, unfortunately, and then failing to notify the public when the US military conducted mock biological attacks on US airports, subway systems, schools, and more, is an ongoing invitation to Putin, the Chinese government, and QAnon to create new fantastic claims.

WMD are known as NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical). We’ve essentially eliminated the B and C, but we are moving in the wrong direction again on the N, as is Putin, the UK, China, India, Pakistan, France, Israel, and obviously North Korea. Thanks to Trump ending the Iran deal, that country is close to becoming a nuclear power too.

When will these evil gaps finally close forever? These are the most unsoldierly weapons imaginable, the sort of weapons that would kill far more civilians than military, that would poison the Earth for millennia, that would irradiate and cause crop failure across the planet leading to mass starvation, and that would guarantee that exactly no country would win, at all, in a nuclear war.

This should be a nonpartisan issue and it should be top priority. Most of humanity has voted in favor of a total ban, but the countries with these weapons are willing to be scofflaw, criminal nations.

It is by far the most serious species suicidal threat to humankind ever and each day we don’t end our species is a miracle. Basic common decency, common sense, dictates we fix this.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Tom H. Hastings.

The post Looking For Leadership That Stands Up to the Lesser Evil appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Scott Owen.

“Do you know what forgiveness means? It’s a decision we make to release a person from the feelings of anger we have against them.”

These are the words of Fred Rogers. Yeah, as in “Mister Rogers.”

You know what else Fred said? Try this on for size: “The only thing evil can’t stand is forgiveness.”

It might be the second-greatest quote about forgiveness I’ve ever heard. Do I really need to tell you the first-greatest?

Just in case: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

So, let’s back up and talk about offering and asking for forgiveness.

We cannot control how everything plays out, but we can control our part in it. This means accepting those seemingly inevitable moments when we will be in a position to either receive or deliver a sincere, heartfelt apology.

The 4 Elements of an Authentic Apology

1. Request Permission to Apologize
This is the forgotten first step. Regardless of how severe (or not) you perceive your transgression to be, you do not have agency when it comes to forgiveness. The wronged person has every right to reject any apology attempt until they are ready.

2. Take Full Responsibility: Show Remorse
“I’m sorry you feel that way” is not remorseful. You don’t apologize for someone else’s feelings. “If anyone was offended, I apologize”? Again: zero contrition. Hold yourself accountable. Let them know that you realize you hurt them. Show regret. Express guilt. Clearly articulate why you are apologizing.

3. No Excuses: Promise to Make Amends and That You Won’t Do it Again
It’s time to put your remorse into an actionable context. That means NO excuses. Communicate with the wronged person to learn how you can best make amends for your affront. Make up for a mistake and do the work to be certain it does not re-occur. Display your remorse in word and deed.

4. Formally Ask for Forgiveness
Like step #1, this one is often neglected. But forgiveness is a dialogue. After the first three steps have been satisfactorily completed, do not assume you’ve automatically been forgiven. Ask for forgiveness and be ready to enter into an open discussion of what that means. Be aware that it doesn’t always mean a reconciliation is imminent.

And speaking of forgiveness. With conflict on the rise and emotions in turmoil, you may also find yourself on the other end of an apology. Pro tip: That part of the process is not as simple as saying “Fine” or “It’s okay.”

5 Ways to Be a Forgiving Person

1. Understand It

Forgiving someone is not the same as condoning their actions. It also doesn’t mean things will or even can return to where they were. Forgiveness is your way to release yourself (and possibly others) from the unhealthy burden of anger and resentment.

2. Honor What You Feel

If you’ve been hurt, let yourself feel that pain. As the victim, you must work through this process before you can calmly address apologies and forgiveness.

3. Choose Your Words and Actions Wisely

Resist the urge to speak disparagingly to others about the person who hurt you. Perhaps more importantly, reject any thoughts of revenge. To be in the position to forgive requires us to eschew behaviors that stem from our reflexive urges.

4. Operate From a Place of Humility

How many times in your life have you messed up and had to face the music? How many more times will something like this occur? Keep this in mind when interacting with any person who has crossed you. Again, you don’t have to condone their actions but you can hold space to understand and forgive them.

5. Release the Need For Blame 

An authentic apology has been offered. You have opted to accept it and forgive the other person. Now… let it go. The time for blame has passed. In fact, if you find yourself still holding a grudge, it is quite possible you’re the one who needs to do some serious introspection.

This brings us back to good, evil, and “Forgive them, Father.”

Check out the short clip above (2.5 minutes). Father Stu makes a good point. “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

It’s a deal. You might even say it’s a covenant.

We want our debts forgiven. Cool. But whose debt are we forgiving? If this sounds too hard, if you’re stuck on who wronged you — especially since March 2020 — remember, this is a spiritual war. And, to come full circle, the only thing evil can’t stand is forgiveness.

We’ve got the blueprint. The covenant was offered a long time ago. Now, how ready are we to hold up our end and say “They know not what they do”?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

A New York Grand Jury empaneled by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has indicted the former president, Donald John Trump. I give all three of Trump's names because that is usually how the felons are referred to in the press.

Some have complained that of all the illegal and destructive things Trump did, this indictment focuses on a relatively minor and tawdry little crime. This complaint derives from a failure to realize that everything about Trump is trivial and always has been.

Just Security has the timeline. Trump was concerned in October 2016 that Stephanie Clifford a.k.a. Stormy Daniels might go to the tabloid press for a big payout for her story about how she and Trump had sex in July 2006 at Lake Tahoe. Ms. Clifford has acted in pornography films, and Trump promised her an appearance on his Apprentice television show. Trump appears to have gone outside his home for sex in 2006 when his wife Melania was pregnant with their son, Baron. That June, he had also approached Playboy model Karen McDougal for sex, and she agreed but says she declined a proffered payment, saying "I'm not that kind of girl." So that liaison, which continued for some time, probably falls under the heading of an affair. Trump was wary of her telling her story, too. Cifford had attempted to sell her story before, but had been thwarted when Trump threatened to sue for libel. Her story became potentially a big draw after the leaked Billy Bush tape of Trump talking about grabbing random women by their genitals.

Trump arranged for his attorney, Michael Cohen, to pay Ms. Clifford $130,000 to tell her story only to The National Enquirer in return for her signing a non-disclosure agreement. The Enquirer, owned by a friend and backer of Trump, David Pecker, in return simply did not print the "Stormy Daniel" scandal. This way of proceeding buried the story and left Ms. Clifford unable to peddle it elsewhere.

A similar deal had already been done with Karen McDougal.

Trump repaid Cohen for the expenditure in installments, either through Trump, Inc. and Alan Weisselberg or from his own private account.

NPR reports that Trump categorized the payments for tax purposes as "for legal services." This was, of course, incorrect, unless it is a new euphemism for having sex at resorts with porn stars and then buying their silence.

It is illegal in New York to misreport on your tax statements the purpose for which money has been spent. This is a crime.

This crime was minor, but it was committed to further another crime, which was to pay hush money for the purposes of a political campaign. In New York, you get felony charges for committing one crime to further another crime.

And that is the case against Trump. Some observers think it may be a case difficult to prove in New York law.

German-American political philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the term "banality of evil" as the subtitle of her 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. She depicted the Nazi mass murderer as a bland and ordinary bureaucrat, just trying to get ahead by blending in. He wasn't a criminal mastermind. He wasn't evil in a brilliant way, as Milton's Lucifer was. He was banal, and his vapidness killed lots of people.

Trump is, of course, also banal. But more than that, he is trivial. He inherited capital from his father as well as know-how concerning the cut-throat real estate markets in the run-down neighborhoods of Queens. He parlayed those advantages into being a billionaire or at least very wealthy. But Queens real estate isn't intrinsically interesting. Trump and his father both had slumlord tendencies, and were probably mobbed up. For all of its mystique, organized crime is also trivial. It is based on primal emotions like fear and greed in our lizard-brains, and it has no vision and builds nothing. It is parasitical. No wonder it ends up making money on garbage. Even its violence just reduces complex human beings full of aspirations to trivial garbage.

Likewise, Trump's television show "The Apprentice" was trivial. If it had never been on television, it wouldn't have mattered. Now that it is no longer on television, it doesn't matter. It was just another phony "reality" show. It may well have involved a scam, as Jose Paglieri at the Daily Beast reported. Lawyers for four angry entrepreneurs looked at The Apprentice outtakes in 2021:

"lawyers for four scorned entrepreneurs know what they're looking for: anything that shows Donald Trump and his kids knew that they were duping would-be investors by leading them to ACN, a multi-level marketing company based in North Carolina.

Trump and his kids—Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric—were the top recurring characters of The Apprentice, playing the role of business judges. During the show, the family featured ACN as a promising investment, even having celebrities compete to produce a commercial for the company's supposedly high-tech new video chatting phone, the "Iris 5000." In reality, the tech was a dud and the company was facing financial turmoil—but viewers weren't told that."

In other words, the Trumps on The Apprentice may have just been conning people. Trump is a ponzi scheme based not on invested capital but invested confidence. Trump is a set of serial shakedowns.

Trump's presidency was trivial, having no accomplishments but one giveaway of billions to his cronies in the form of a tax cut. It was so predictable. He seems to have sat around all day in his pajamas watching Fox Cable News and spewing out nonsensical tweets. He spent a third of his time playing golf, and went out on the Hastings telling his 30,000 trivial lies.

Trump has never been important enough to be banal. He never had the discipline for banality. His mind has all the focus of a butterfly in a hurricane. He flits from one triviality to another.

Trump's vulgar gyrations with a sex worker whom he flimflammed with the promise of a television appearance that would never happen were trivial. This indictment is a fitting commentary on our century's "Mr. Griffith." Haven't heard of "Mr. Griffith?" That's because he was trivial.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Juan Cole.

The post The Urbanity of Evil: 20 Years After the Invasion of Iraq appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Norman Solomon.

Vast quantities of lies from top U.S. government officials led up to the Iraq invasion. Now, marking its 20th anniversary, the same media outlets that eagerly boosted those lies are offering retrospectives. Don't expect them to shed light on the most difficult truths, including their own complicity in pushing for war.

What propelled the United States to start the war on Iraq in March 2003 were dynamics of media and politics that are still very much with us today.

Soon after 9/11, one of the rhetorical whips brandished by President George W. Bush was an unequivocal assertion while speaking to a joint session of Congress on Sept. 20, 2001: "Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." Thrown down, that gauntlet received adulation and scant criticism in the United States. Mainstream media and members of Congress were almost all enthralled with a Manichean worldview that has evolved and persisted.

Our current era is filled with echoes of such oratory from the current president. A few months before fist-bumping Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman—who's been in charge of a tyrannical regime making war on Yemen, causing several hundred thousand deaths since 2015 with U.S. government help—Joe Biden mounted a pulpit of supreme virtue during his 2022 State of the Union address.

Biden proclaimed "an unwavering resolve that freedom will always triumph over tyranny." And he added that "in the battle between democracy and autocracies, democracies are rising to the moment." Of course, there was no mention of his support for Saudi autocracy and war.

In that State of the Union speech, Biden devoted much emphasis to condemning Russia's war on Ukraine, as he has many times since. Biden's presidential hypocrisies do not in any way justify the horrors that Russian forces are inflicting in Ukraine. Nor does that war justify the deadly hypocrisies that pervade U.S. foreign policy.

This week, don't hold your breath for media retrospectives about the Iraq invasion to include basic facts about the key roles of Biden and the man who is now secretary of state, Antony Blinken. When they each denounce Russia while solemnly insisting that it is absolutely unacceptable for one country to invade another, the Orwellian efforts are brazen and shameless.

Last month, speaking to the UN Security Council, Blinken invoked "the principles and rules that make all countries safer and more secure"—such as "no seizing land by force" and "no wars of aggression." But Biden and Blinken were crucial accessories to the massive war of aggression that was the invasion of Iraq. On the very rare occasions when Biden has been put on the spot for how he helped make the invasion politically possible, his response has been to dissemble and tell outright lies.

"Biden has a long history of inaccurate claims" regarding Iraq, scholar Stephen Zunes pointed out four years ago. "For example, in the lead-up to the critical Senate vote authorizing the invasion, Biden used his role as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to insist that Iraq somehow reconstituted a vast arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, a nuclear weapons program and sophisticated delivery systems that had long since been eliminated." The false claim of supposed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was the main pretext for the invasion.

That falsehood was challenged in real time, many months before the invasion, by numerousexperts. But then-Senator Biden, wielding the gavel of the Foreign Relations Committee, excluded them all from two days of high-impact sham hearings in mid-summer 2002.

And who was the chief of staff of the committee at that time? The current secretary of state, Antony Blinken.

We're apt to put Biden and Blinken in a completely different category than someone like Tariq Aziz, who was Iraq's deputy prime minister under despot Saddam Hussein. But, thinking back to the three meetings with Aziz that I attended in Baghdad during the months before the invasion, I have some doubts.

Aziz wore nicely tailored business suits. Speaking excellent English in measured tones and well-crafted sentences, he had an erudite air with no lack of politesse as he greeted our four-member delegation (which I had organized with colleagues at the Institute for Public Accuracy). Our group included Congressman Nick Rahall of West Virginia, former South Dakota senator James Abourezk and Conscience International president James Jennings. As it turned out, the meeting occurred six months before the invasion.

At the time of that meeting in mid-September 2002, Aziz was able to concisely sum up a reality that few U.S. media outlets were acknowledging. "It's doomed if you do, doomed if you don't," Aziz said, referring to the Iraqi government's choice of whether to let UN weapons inspectors back into the country.

After meetings with Aziz and other Iraqi officials, I told the Washington Post: "If it was strictly a matter of the inspections and they felt there was a light at the end of the tunnel, this would be a totally fixable problem." But it was far from being strictly a matter of the inspections. The Bush administration was determined to make war on Iraq.

A couple of days after the Aziz meeting, Iraq's regime—which was accurately stating that it had no weapons of mass destruction—announced that it would allow UN inspectors back into the country. (They had been withdrawn four years earlier for their safety on the eve of an anticipated U.S. bombing attack that took place for four days.) But compliance with the United Nations was to no avail. The U.S. government leaders wanted to launch an invasion of Iraq, no matter what.

During two later meetings with Aziz, in December 2002 and January 2003, I was repeatedly struck by his capacity to seem cultured and refined. While the main spokesperson for a vicious dictator, he exuded sophistication. I thought of the words "the urbanity of evil."

A well-informed source told me that Saddam Hussein maintained some kind of leverage over Aziz by keeping his son in jeopardy of imprisonment or worse, lest Aziz become a defector. Whether or not that was the case, Deputy Prime Minister Aziz remained loyal to the end. As someone in Jean Renoir's film The Rules of the Game says, "The awful thing about life is this: Everybody has their reasons."

Tariq Aziz had good reasons to fear for his life—and the lives of loved ones—if he ran afoul of Saddam. In contrast, many politicians and officials in Washington have gone along with murderous policies when dissenting might cost them only re-election, prestige, money or power.

I last saw Aziz in January 2003, while accompanying a former UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq to meet with him. Talking to the two of us in his Baghdad office, Aziz seemed to know an invasion was virtually certain. It began two months later. The Pentagon was pleased to brand its horrific air attacks on the city "shock and awe."

On July 1, 2004, appearing before an Iraqi judge in a courtroom located on a U.S. military base near Baghdad airport, Aziz said: "What I want to know is, are these charges personal? Is it Tariq Aziz carrying out these killings? If I am a member of a government that makes the mistake of killing someone, then there can't justifiably be an accusation against me personally. Where there is a crime committed by the leadership, the moral responsibility rests there, and there shouldn't be a personal case just because somebody belongs to the leadership." And, Aziz went on to say, "I never killed anybody, by the acts of my own hand."

The invasion that Joe Biden helped to inflict on Iraq resulted in a war that directly killed several hundred thousand civilians. If he were ever really called to account for his role, Biden's words might resemble those of Tariq Aziz.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Norman Solomon.

The post Roaming Charges: See No Evil appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.

Steve Skrovan: Welcome to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. My name is Steve Skrovan, along with my co-host, David Feldman. Hello, David, how are you?

David Feldman: Very good. Hello.

Steve Skrovan: And of course, the man of the hour, Ralph Nader, is with us. Hello, Ralph.

Ralph Nader: Hello, everybody.

Steve Skrovan: All right, we have another great show for you today, and we’re going to start with one of my favorite guests who’s been on the show before. Many journalists and pundits cover war from a safe distance in a clean studio. Few have experienced the gritty reality of war like Chris Hedges. He spent nearly 20 years overseas as a correspondent for the New York Times getting to know war up close and personal. He wrote eloquently about it in his award-winning War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning where he states, “The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years.”

Today, the war in Ukraine is raging. Establishment news outlets offer of generals and State Department officials to tell us the partisan, political and strategic story of war that seems only to fuel that addiction and keep us rooting for “our team.” In contrast, Hedges has written another book about the subject titled War is the Greatest Evil. In this new book, Hedges draws on his firsthand experience to tell us the story of the hidden costs of war and what it does to individuals, families, communities, and nations. We look forward to talking to Chris about how we, as a society and as individuals, can possibly overcome this ultimately destructive addiction.

***

David Feldman: Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, who spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He is the host of The Chris Hedges Report, and he is a prolific author— his latest book is out now from Seven Stories Press, The Greatest Evil Is War. Welcome back to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour, Chris Hedges.

Chris Hedges: Thank you.

Ralph Nader: Welcome back indeed, Chris. I see this book of yours as a sequel–an update and expansion in terms of its impact of Marine General Smedley Butler’s book in the late 1930s called War is a Racket, which people are still reading. And he got the Congressional Medal of Honor twice. And he basically said he was a tool for Citibank, for the oil companies in the Caribbean, Central America, East Asia. It’s one of the greatest confessions. And he had some photographs at the end of the book on the grizzly effects of war, so he didn’t spare either words or visuals. And your book is an expansion of that theme.

And as I said to you earlier, before the program, Chris, and I want our listeners to know that there’s no way to paraphrase what Chris has written. So I’ve asked Chris to read two and a half pages at the beginning of his book, The Greatest Evil is War, and then we can discuss the book and its impact. And I have some interesting comparisons for you, listeners, to show that ultimately the problem is that the people of this country are not applying their value systems into the realm of politics and economics. Go ahead, Chris.

Chris Hedges: Thanks, Ralph. Preemptive war, whether in Iraq or Ukraine, is a war crime. It does not matter if the war is launched on the basis of lies and fabrications, as was the case in Iraq, or because of the breaking of a series of agreements with Russia, including the promise by Washington not to extend NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany, not to deploy thousands of NATO troops in Central and Eastern Europe, and not to meddle in the internal affairs of nations on the Russia’s border, as well as the refusal to implement the Minsk peace agreement. The invasion of Ukraine would, I expect, never have happened if these promises had been kept. Russia has every right to feel threatened, betrayed, and angry. But to understand is not to condone. The invasion of Ukraine, under post-Nuremberg laws, is a criminal war of aggression.

I know the instrument of war. War is not politics by other means. It is demonic. I spent two decades as a war correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans, where I covered the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. I carry within me the ghosts of dozens of those swallowed up in the violence, including my close friend, Reuters correspondent Kurt Schork, who was killed in an ambush in Sierra Leone with another friend, Miguel Gil Moreno de Mora.

I know the chaos and disorientation of war, the constant uncertainty and confusion. In a firefight you are only aware of what is happening a few feet around you. You desperately, and not always successfully, struggle to figure out where the firing is coming from to avoid being hit.

I have felt the helplessness and paralyzing fear, which, years later, descend on me like a freight train in the middle of the night, leaving me wrapped in coils of terror, my heart racing, my body dripping with sweat.

I have heard the wails of those convulsed by grief as they clutch the bodies of friends and family, including children. I hear them still. It does not matter the language—Spanish, Arabic, Hebrew, Dinka, Serbo-Croatian, Albanian, Ukrainian, Russian—death cuts through the linguistic barriers.

I know what wounds look like—legs blown off, heads imploded into a bloody, pulpy mass, gaping holes in stomachs, pools of blood, cries of the dying, sometimes for their mothers. And the smell. The smell of death. The supreme sacrifice made for flies and maggots.

I was beaten by Iraqi and Saudi secret police. I was taken prisoner by the Contras in Nicaragua, who radioed back to their base in Honduras to see if they should kill me, and again in Basra after the first Gulf War in Iraq, never knowing if I would be executed, under constant guard and often without food, drinking out of mud puddles.

The primary lesson in war is that we as distinct individuals do not matter. We become numbers, fodder, objects. Life, once precious and sacred, becomes meaningless, sacrificed to the insatiable appetite of Mars. No one in wartime is exempt.

The landscape of war is hallucinogenic. Eugene Sledge calls it “the kaleidoscope of the unreal.” It defies comprehension. War, like the Holocaust, as Barbara Foley wrote, is “unknowable.” “Its full dimensions are inaccessible to the ideological framework that we have inherited from the liberal era.”

You have no concept of time in a firefight—a few minutes a few hours. War, in an instant, obliterates homes and communities, all that was once familiar, and leaves behind smoldering ruins and a trauma that you carry for the rest of your life. I have tasted enough of war, enough of my own fear, my body turned to jelly, to know that war is always evil, the purest expression of death, dressed up in patriotic cant about liberty and democracy and sold to the naïve as a ticket to glory, honor, and courage. It is a toxic and seductive elixir. “Those who survive, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “struggle afterwards to reinvent themselves and their universe, which, on some level, will never make sense again.”

Walt Whitman, who tended wounded soldiers in hospitals during the Civil War, wrote in a heading in his notebook: “The real war will never get in the books.” “Its interior history will not only never be written,” Whitman argues, “its practicality, minutiae of deeds and passions, will never be even suggested.”

Ralph Nader: Listeners, I just want to give you some comparisons here. This book came out Seven Stories Press, but they do use Random House as a distributor, so they can get into all the bookstores if there are orders and they can get into all the online vendors as well. A book that came out in 2012 and 2013 called American Sniper, which is a book by an expert sniper for the US military in Iraq, and was turned into a movie; ten years later, on Amazon, it ranks ahead of Chris Hedges’s book. This is just an example that bloodthirsty military action books sell far more than books that challenge the grizzly evil and crimes of war. It’s books of aggression, violence, military prowess that gained the bestseller list. You’ve analyzed the public attitudes on this and thought about it. Why do you think this is so? It’s so contrary to the survival instinct of human beings.

Chris Hedges: Because those books are a celebration of us as a people, as a nation. And challenging that self-exaltation, which books like mine do, is unpleasant because it forces us to ask questions about ourselves and our nation that are deeply troubling and uncomfortable. And people prefer the self-adulation, the self-adulatory myths. This is what every war movie that Hollywood makes – Saving Private Ryan, and doesn’t matter what it is–they prefer that self-adulation, because in the end, it’s really a celebration of us. I think that’s why.

Ralph Nader: Do you think it’s also that the warlike forces in our society have seized the symbols of patriotism. They’ve seized the flag; they’ve seized the anthems; they’ve seized the awards. There’s a Congressional Medal of Honor for soldiers involved in war. There’s not a Congressional Medal of Honor for the peacemakers/the conflict avoiders. And once they control that meaning of patriotism, it becomes an intimidating factor. And people who otherwise would step up and speak out are afraid to go against that symbol with all its holidays and all its marching bands, etcetera, for fear of being accused of unpatriotic behavior or worse, anything to that?

Chris Hedges: Yes, I think in any militaristic society that’s exactly what happens. So even Robert E. Lee, who was a traitor fighting for one of the worst causes that any war ever embraced, has full portrait in a Confederate uniform that’s hanging in the library in West Point. And not to mention the fact that there are all sorts of parts of West Point that are named after him. So it is a celebration of those Marshall qualities, which you’re right, are fused with the idea of patriotism. I mean, what is a patriot? A patriot, I would argue, was someone who works to make the country a better place, which would preclude a figure like Robert E. Lee. And probably all sorts of other military figures as well. Martin Luther King would be, in my mind, a patriot, but that’s a different definition of patriotism. So much of this hijacking of the iconography and symbols and language of the nation and the highest form of patriotism lies with the media and, of course, with the entertainment industry and it’s very hard to fight against.

Ralph Nader: Yeah, well, there are Veterans for Peace in Iraq. Veterans that are trying to do their bit, but it starts in the schools too. It starts right in the first grade.

Chris Hedges: Yes, right, exactly. That’s right.

Ralph Nader: This book is very hard to describe, listeners, because it has a diverse impact in its contents. It’s not just a one-note type book symbolized by its title, The Greatest Evil is War. We’re speaking with Chris Hedges. Chris, it is true historically, is it not, that militaristic societies eventually devour themselves like Sparta?

Chris Hedges: Well, or like the Athenian Empire or the Roman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian empire. Every empire ultimately devours itself. And historians like Arnold Toynbee argued that the prime reason that empires disembowel themselves is unchecked militarism. I studied classics. That was certainly true in Rome, the one million man army and the Praetorian Guard was auctioning off the position of emperor to the highest bidder; we’re not too far away from that ourselves. The Pentagon is totally out of control, hasn’t been audited for I think for a decade. Every year it gets more money, sometimes even unasked for, and it’s consuming, not only tremendous amounts of resources; technically it’s half of all discretionary spending. But when you add other programs, veteran affairs, nuclear and everything else, it’s much more than that. And of course, it’s prosecuting one military debacle after another going all the way back to Vietnam, and they’re never held accountable.

So that is traditionally how empires are one of the major factors. Depletion of natural resources, of course, is often another. But that unchecked militarism is cancerous to a civilization. And it overreaches in the end. So, as it decays, as we have decayed, it engages in more forms of military adventurism in an attempt to reclaim a lost hegemony and a lost glory and a lost power. And this was certainly true in Athens in the disastrous invasion of Sicily. I think their whole fleet was sunk. So we are following that very familiar trajectory. This is why Karl Liebknecht, a Socialist German leader in World War I, quite astutely called the German military the enemy from within. And I would argue that that’s an appropriate way to characterize the military industrial establishment in the United States.

Ralph Nader: It’s certainly drawn trillions of dollars over the years – trillions and trillions of dollars from the necessities of our domestic society, from the public works, the infrastructure, the schools, the public transit, the community health clinics, the public libraries, bridges, highways, soil conservation, the whole pollution-control investment. Now, climate disruption and foreseen pandemics, which we have starved the budgets of both the CDC and the World Health Organization. And I think a lot of our listeners may not know that the main reason we didn’t get universal health insurance under Lyndon Johnson and got Medicare and limited Medicaid was because of the money we were spending on the Vietnam War, which was a criminal war of aggression as well and never declared by the Congress.

What, Chris, would you like to highlight before we conclude? And we really would like another program more extensively because I know we’re going to get a tremendous reaction from our listeners. What points would you like to make briefly?

Chris Hedges: I would highlight the chapter of “The Pimps of War” because this is this coterie of groups and individuals, and I dealt with them all the way back when I covered the war in El Salvador for five years. Elliott Abrams and Robert Kagan worked for Abrams in the State Department under the Reagan administration. And their job was really to attempt to discredit all of our reporting on the ground, because the Salvadoran death squads run out of three different military units run by the government were killing between 700 and a 1000 innocent, unarmed civilians a month. So the war industry has perpetuated these people. It doesn’t matter how many times they’re wrong – they’re wrong about Iraq, wrong about Libya, wrong about Afghanistan, and their think tanks—the Project for the new American Century, American Enterprise Institute, Foreign Policy Initiative, Institute for the Study of War, Atlantic Council, Brookings Institution—

it’s kind of like this mutant strain of an antibiotic resistant bacteria we can’t get rid of. And these people are on the airwaves. They were the people who sold us the war in Iraq, which alone should discredit anything they have to say about Ukraine. They are incredibly cavalier about the possibility of nuclear war, which they all acknowledge. Former CIA director Brennan the other day said there is now one in 25% chance of nuclear conflict that all of these people Supreme Court Justice Elana Kagan, right-wing conservative William Kristol and others… and what’s interesting is that both parties are war parties.

Ralph Nader: What’s cruelly paradoxical is that you were an award-winning military correspondent and reporter on other subjects for the New York Times for over 20 years and you can’t get into the New York Times op-ed page. And your book, The Greatest Evil is War, wasn’t listed in the New York Times Book Review. On the other hand, the consummate admitted warmonger John Bolton, who was, for a limited amount of time, the security adviser on terrorism to Donald Trump, wrote a book which, said that obstruction of justice was a way of life in the Trump White House. Obstruction of justice is serious crime.

His book was reviewed in the New York Times. And he gets in op-eds in the New York Times and Washington Post. And he just admitted very recently that he’s advocated coup d’état. He advocated the bombing of North Korea, the toppling of Iranian regime by military means. A Yale Law graduate who doesn’t know about the constitutional restraints on wars that are not declared by the Congress, not to mention other international law illegalities. How do you explain that?

Chris Hedges: Well, having worked for the New York Times, it is a newspaper that will cater obsequiously to the centers of power and is extremely reticent about challenging those centers that may critique the excesses of power, but it will never critique the virtues of power. And so if a writer, such as myself, goes after the structural injustices and inequities, which include the rise of the military state, then you crossed a line they’re very hesitant to embrace because of the blowback. So there’s no blowback for being nice to John Bolton. There’s quite a bit of blowback for– I mean, you’re virtually banned from the Times. When I worked with the Times, they wouldn’t even put Chomsky’s name in the newspapers. It was not written on a wall. It wasn’t rule, but everybody knew, even if it was about linguistics. So there’s a very insidious form of censorship, but the war industry is a large advertiser, especially on the television networks. And so who you see talking about war is always former intelligence officials, Brennan, Clapper, former generals. And let’s not forget these people, although it’s not disclosed, are sitting on the boards of companies like Raytheon raking in lots of money. So they have a vast kind of personal interest in perpetuating war because they make money off of it as pointed out by (Smedley) Butler, in his speech “War is a Racket.”

Ralph Nader: Yeah, one of the only deviations from the blackout of Noam Chomsky by the New York Times was a recent lengthy interview by Ezra Klein of the New York Times on his podcast. He had Noam Chomsky on for an hour. Last question is how do you get people to impress upon their senators and representatives? Because the peace movement has got to begin turning Congress around. That’s where the appropriation funds and the neglect of saying there’s going to be no war without a declaration from Congress, comes from. How do you get them to focus on their senators and representatives? They’re back home now. They’re shaking hands. They’re going to events prior to the November election. This is a good time to get to them.

And we have a Congress Club with several hundred members who are supposed to be even more keen on impressing the many issues on this program on their two senators and representatives. How would you arouse them even more about focusing on those 535 members who represent and control the sovereign power delegated to them by the people, and who so often have turned the sovereign power against the very people themselves. Let’s say you were on the stump and you had one or two minutes to convey a motivational expression.

Chris Hedges: Well, the Democrats have to be held accountable because they are culpable. And I think we saw tremendous opposition to the Iraq war, hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, not particularly well covered, but they were there. And then to elect Kerry, who kind of out-Fallujahed George Bush. Remember saluting and he wouldn’t have withdrawn; everybody stopped standing up against the war industry because they thought electing Kerry would somehow make things better. However, democratic administrations are wholly in lockstep with the Republicans on militarism, and in some cases even worse, because they provide more cover. We’ve given $50 billion – I think is the amount now – to Ukraine. I mean, the whole State Department budget is only $60 billion. And not to mention, that’s about five times what we give to the EPA. So, we have to hold those who prosecute permanent war – Democrat or Republican— accountable. And I think that by surrendering to a Democratic administration in the idea that it’s “the least worst,” we weaken our power and our credibility.

Ralph Nader: Not to mention inadequate budgets to head off future pandemics and to deal with the present COVID-19 pandemic that Congress has sat on mostly the Republican opposition, I might add. So well listen, we’ve been talking with Chris Hedges, author of this concise, pulsating fact-based book, The Greatest Evil is War, Published by Seven Stories Press. Start discussions around in the neighborhood, listeners. Send copies to your library and schools. It’s a readable book. It’s not huge. It can be read in a few hours and it will never put anybody to drowsiness. What’s the best way to reach you?

Chris Hedges: chrishedges.substack.com.

Ralph Nader: That’s chrishedges.substack.com. And you also go around and you deliver speeches to various groups in the US and Canada, and they’re always very, very well attended. So keep doing what you’re doing, Chris, and to be continued.

Chris Hedges: Thanks, Ralph.

Ralph Nader: Thank you very much, Chris.

Chris Hedges: Thank you, Ralph.

Steve Skrovan: We’ve been speaking with Chris Hedges. We will link to his book The Greatest Evil is War at ralphnaderradiohour.com. Up next, Mark Green joins Ralph to share winning strategies for Democrats. But first, let’s check in with our corporate crime reporter, Russell Mokhiber.

Russell Mokhiber: From the National Press Building in Washington, D.C., this is your Corporate Crime Reporter “Morning Minute” for Friday, October 28, 2022. I’m Russell Mokhiber.

Cosmetics company, L’Oréal, is being sued over claims that its chemical hair straightening products put women at an increased risk of uterine cancer, that’s according to a report from CNN.

Civil rights Attorney Ben Crump filed the lawsuit last week in Illinois on behalf of 32-year-old Missouri resident Jenny Mitchell, claiming that Mitchell’s uterine cancer “was directly and proximately caused by her regular and prolonged exposure to phthalates and other endocrine disrupting chemicals found in the defendant’s hair care products.”

“As most young African-American girls, chemical relaxers, chemical straighteners were introduced to us at a young age,” Mitchell said. “Society has made it a norm to look a certain way, in order to feel a certain way. And I am the first voice of many voices to come that will stand up to those companies, and say, ‘No more.'”

To hear more of this interview go to ralphnaderradiohour.com.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ralph Nader.

The post War in the Ukraine is Not a Fight Between Good and Evil; Just Bad vs. Bad appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Van Deusen.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Lee Camp.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Everyone is the other and no one is himself.

— Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 1927

The Branch Covidian putsch is the most heinous crime ever perpetrated in the history of medicine, and some would argue, in the history of the world. Its success is attributable to the strong presence of Nazi bioethics within the ranks of Western physicians, as well as a broad base of support from the ranks of neoliberals. This inhuman cult dogma, so destructive to the human spirit and antithetical to democracy, is anchored in a contempt for informed consent, and is fueled by careerism, hubris, blind obedience, and an unwavering belief in the infallibility of the public health agencies.

Like any other cult ethos, Branch Covidian dogma operates outside the boundaries of logic and reason. Moreover, all totalitarians are amnesiacs in the sense that they have lost the ability to place political events in their appropriate historical context. Consequently, they can be lied to repeatedly without this leading them to question the veracity of an official narrative mired in pseudoscience and malevolent propaganda.

American doctors have been groomed for the biosecurity putsch for years, as their military-style training is predicated on the notion that their superiors are demigods that must be obeyed unquestioningly. Pronouncements frequently parroted by the legacy media that end up being demonstrably untrue, such as the tale that the mRNA vaccines will take us to herd immunity, fail to break the stranglehold that the cult has over its followers, but rather, as Mattias Desmet has noted, only seem to reinforce it. The claim (reminiscent of Nazi anti-Semitism) that the unvaccinated are spreaders of disease, and that they will have to live with the shame of having murdered their friends and relatives, is still being reiterated even long after it has become apparent that the vaccines do not prevent transmission.

There are dozens of studies that show the ineffectiveness of masks, and dozens that underscore their deleterious health effects when worn incessantly. There are also no less than 140 studies demonstrating that natural immunity to Covid-19 is durable, robust, and long-lasting. The new claim by the apostolic power, that the vaccines diminish virulence, is clearly an attempt on the part of the health care papacy to invent a new narrative following the failure of the “immunization drive.”

“Follow the science” is, in fact, a euphemism for “Be quiet and do as you’re told.” The claim that an experimental vaccine can be rigorously tested in under a year and found to be “safe and effective” is absurd, as the process typically takes at least ten years using traditional vaccine technologies. Yet the Branch Covidian isn’t interested in the rule of law, science, morality or even basic common sense. Like the followers of Jack in Lord of the Flies, they are transfixed by the intoxicating power of the death cult.

A few weeks ago I asked one of my doctors how the vaccines could be safe when there were over 30,000 deaths on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), to which he replied, “Well, a lot of people took them.” In other words, this is an acceptable degree of collateral damage. In many ways, this is an even more deranged line of reasoning than that made by Dr. Gerhard Rose, head of the Koch Institute of Tropical Medicine during the Third Reich. Rose attempted to justify doing typhus vaccine experiments on concentration camp prisoners at the Doctors’ Trial by claiming that it was acceptable to sacrifice a hundred men if tens of thousands of German soldiers could potentially be saved, as the Wehrmacht was being ravaged by typhus. This argument was rejected by the court, and he was incarcerated. Like Fauci, Walensky, and Collins, Rose was also “really smart.”

Yet another one of my physicians recently brought up the issue of Covid and suggested that I might consider getting the mRNA vaccine. His reasoning was as follows: he had a difficult bout with Covid despite being “fully vaccinated.” In other words, instead of concluding, as any rational person would, that the Covid vaccines demonstrate questionable efficacy, he concluded that the vaccine saved his life, that it dramatically reduced virulence, and that without it he might have ended up in an intensive care unit. Both doctors attended prestigious schools, and at least ostensibly, are of sound mind.

When the FDA panel met to discuss whether to go ahead with approving the investigational inoculations for children aged five to eleven, Harvard professor and editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine Dr. Eric Rubin said “We’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it. That’s just the way it goes.” Does one have to be a graduate of an elite medical school to see that this is an utterly depraved argument?

The government of the Third Reich deceived millions of Germans into believing that they had a vast array of enemies, all of which were the spawn of the Nazi propaganda apparatus: Jews, communists, Russians, and Poles to name some of the most prominent. A similar thing has transpired with the Branch Covidians, who have been taught to despise “anti-vaxxers,” “science deniers,” “flat-earthers,” “conspiracy theorists,” and “misinformation spreaders.” This obsessive need to scapegoat is also on display with regard to the neoliberal hatred of “white privilege,” “white supremacists,” “nativists,” “misogynists,” “Trumpers,” and “Putin apologists” – the list seems to be growing by the week.

 Furthermore, this scapegoating is inextricably linked with efforts to dismantle the First Amendment, as authoritarian regimes cannot abide criticism. In an article in The Federalist by doctors Harvey Risch, Robert Malone, and Byram Bridle, the eminent authors warn of a regime which is increasingly intolerant of dissent:

Questioning the competence and integrity of government bureaucracies like the FDA doesn’t make someone a bad person or a spreader of disinformation. Government bureaucracies can be wrong, and historically the citizens of democracies have viewed it as not only their right but their duty to scrutinize public officials’ decisions. Dissent is an integral part of the sacred compact between government and governed that underpins a free society, and Americans allow the current regime of censorship to continue at their extreme peril.

When giving an introduction to Naomi Wolf’s The Bodies of Others at a book event in New York City, Dr. Harvey Risch denounced the devastating effects of the lockdowns, saying that the isolation has turned us into “sub-people.” Chelsea Manning has compared the lockdowns with putting billions of human beings into solitary confinement, saying “people are going to take years to recover from this.”

Blatant lies spewed by the three letter agencies, such as the claim that Hydroxychloroquine can damage the heart, or that Ivermectin is only a veterinary drug when it is on the World Health Organization’s Model List of Essential Medicines, fail to shake the Branch Covidian belief that the orchestrators of the Covid response are irreproachable. (As Dr. Pierre Kory has done with Ivermectin, an entire book could be written on the war on Hydroxychloroquine).

Calls to halt the disastrous mRNA vaccine program are being ignored, even when they come from distinguished voices such as the World Council for Health and renowned cardiologists Aseem Malhotra and Peter McCullough. Only those who represent the Branch Covidian priesthood – replete with its artful pope, cardinals, and bishops – are ordained to be “the experts.”

The Western elites are acutely aware of the fact that if they can obliterate informed consent they can destroy democracy, as this would render both freedom of speech and habeas corpus obsolete. Having reached the zombie stage of capitalism, the Branch Covidian wallows in a state of unreason, amorality, and an atavistic yearning. Like Adolf Eichmann, they no longer live in a world where good and evil exist. There is only one’s career, the illusion of having overcome an excruciating alienation, and the sense of ecstasy that comes from a newfound sense of belonging to the Covid religion.

For many years the education system has played a key role in fomenting totalitarianization by replacing humanities courses with increasingly specialized vocationally oriented courses, while rewarding ideological subservience and punishing creativity, integrity, honesty and critical thinking. It is not a coincidence that many of the most indoctrinated Americans went to the most competitive schools, as they were invented for this very purpose.

Intertwined with the ongoing weaponization of medicine, medical students and residents are often mentored in a manner where they invariably acquire a derisive attitude towards informed consent. For example, practice pelvic exams done on anesthetized patients, patients arm-twisted into accepting the presence of trainees during their physician office visits, trainees instructed to disregard do-not-resuscitate orders (or its antithesis), trainees immersed in an environment where unnecessary surgeries are regularly performed, pediatric residents inculcated with contempt towards parental informed consent, gynecology residents trained to blackmail women into having Pap smears in exchange for birth control; and a willful failure to caution trainees regarding the highly addictive nature of opioids, benzodiazepines, barbiturates, and many psychotropic drugs – all are commonplace in American teaching hospitals.

As transpired in Weimar Germany, the West is undergoing a period of cataclysmic destabilization which has led to a growing sense of meaninglessness, alienation, unprecedented levels of atomization, and an unraveling of centuries-old mores and ethical norms. This disintegration of communities, coupled with a growing economic inequality, has brought about the rise of a hyper-careerism where millions of people will do anything to advance their careers. The more coveted the job, the more professional success demands a deep-seated ideological and political conformity. Since there is no perceived benefit in the eyes of the hyper-careerist to being educated regarding the many serious and complex political and socio-economic problems that we face, self-imposed ignorance presents itself as a sensible course of action.

The failure of the Branch Covidian doctor to acknowledge the irrationality behind “the science” (often preposterous even to a layperson), along with their inability to acknowledge the absence of a sound risk-benefit analysis behind any of the official Covid policies, is indicative of their having lost their souls to the cannibalistic machinery of corporate medicine. Every physician, especially in the West, should have been able to immediately ascertain that the lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, forced testing, etc., had nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with authoritarianism due to the utter absence of informed consent. That this didn’t occur, underscores how, with the exception of the handful of courageous doctors that have spoken out, the medical profession has been led into a morass of profound moral degradation.

Undoubtedly, those who have doubts about the official narrative yet remain silent, do so out of fear of losing their job. What they fail to understand is that this craven silence may eventually lead to a situation where the penalty for speaking out will be a loss of freedom which is total and absolute. Indeed, if informed consent is irrevocably lost, the pathologizing of dissent will be normalized. This is evidenced by the fact that Canadian physician Dr. Mel Bruchet, and for a somewhat shorter duration, Swiss cardiologist Dr. Thomas Binder, were committed and handed over to the Cult of Psychiatry for expressing heretical views on Branch Covidian theology, and so the process is already underway. This is the last stage of biofascism.

The penchant for overspecialization (which many doctors are presently hiding behind), ruthless ambition, and an indifference towards the most outrageous forms of regulatory capture has caused the biomedical technocrat to be molded into an insensate automaton of a rapacious oligarchy. How is a Branch Covidian doctor who believes that the psychopathic Covid mandates have been necessary to protect people from a virus any less deluded than an American soldier who is sent to Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan and believes that they are “fighting for democracy?”

Writing in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt emphasizes the connection between evil and mindlessness:

Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.

Karl Brandt, Reich Commissioner for Health and Sanitation and one of the most senior Nazi doctors on trial at Nuremberg, insisted that he was innocent of any wrongdoing when taking the stand at the Doctors’ Trial, despite having been a leading proponent of the Nazi euthanasia program and having been involved in forced medical experimentation on concentration camp inmates. The Nazi medical establishment believed that these ghastly crimes, which were in such incontrovertible violation of the Hippocratic Oath, were acceptable due to the credo of “the greater good” being upheld. Indeed, the Nazi doctor’s sense of utilitarianism regarded German society as one organism, with each person like a cell that collectively comprised this organism. Hence, killing Jews, the mentally ill, along with other Untermenschen, was rationalized in the same way that an oncologist today would regard liquidating cancer cells in an attempt to save a single human life. Today, the Volk is not a race, per se, but the Western elites.

This extreme collectivist mentality, which is as intertwined with Branch Covidian doctrine as it was with the Nazi medical ethos, is antithetical to the informed consent ethic and has played a critical role in laying the foundation for a burgeoning health dictatorship.

One must get vaccinated to protect other people. One must wear a mask to protect other people. One must practice social distancing to protect other people. One must get tested to protect other people. The foundational precept of the Nuremberg Code is that medical ethics is rooted in the right to informed consent of the individual.

Dr. Paul Alexander, a pandemic advisor under the Trump administration, who has repeatedly decried the catastrophic harms of the lockdowns, and who possesses more empathy than the overwhelming majority of American doctors put together, has recounted a story about how he asked a senior CDC official where they got the science of the “six feet rule” of social distancing from, to which the official laughed and said it had nothing to do with science – it was about power.

Mindless compliance with policies which are obviously not backed by science, which have an irrational risk-benefit analysis, and which trample on every human being’s inalienable right to bodily autonomy, have brought us to a crossroads where we are hovering over an abyss of a brutal authoritarianism. Nevertheless, it is essential that we continue to intellectually challenge the sleepwalkers.

The Pentagon sacked Iraq; the Romans, Carthage; and the Greeks, Troy. Yet the Branch Covidians have sacked the whole world. Only through the restoration of reason and compassion can humanity cleanse itself from this demonic and fiendish scourge.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by David Penner.

"People of some experience and self-knowledge know that the contest between right and wrong is perennial in the soul of every human, and that right and wrong cannot be geographically divided."

"In conversations with friends peripheral to the making of this book over several years, I have received a number of warnings of the retribution that will surely follow any interest that I may show in understanding the Confederate soldiers, or any revelation of any sympathy that I may feel for any of them, for any reason," he writes just shy of the book's halfway point. He says that "now that I am old"—Berry turned 88 on August 5—his friends feel "that I am at risk of some dire breach of political etiquette by feebleness of mind or some fit of ill-advised candor, and they would like me not to stir up trouble for myself."

Too late. By this point in the book, Berry has described Confederate General Robert E. Lee as "one of the great tragic figures of our history," who "more prominently than anyone else . . . affirmed, obeyed, and suffered the need to defend his homeland and his people." He's also noted that General "Stonewall" Jackson "thought slavery immoral [and] never owned a slave." And he is just about to delve deeper into the complexity of the Confederate cause.

"But I wonder," Berry continues in response to his friends' concerns, "if they have considered well enough what they have asked of me, which amounts to a radical revision of my calling. They are not asking me for my most careful thoughts about what I have learned or experienced. They are asking me to lay aside my old effort to tell the truth, as it is given to me by my own knowledge and judgment, in order to take up another art, which is that of public relations."

While Berry says the reaction so far to The Need to Be Whole, out Oct. 4, as opposed to the blowback he got from early readers, has actually been mostly positive, the book is decidedly not an exercise in public relations. Berry decries slavery while arguing that the motivations of the South were not all malevolent, just as those of the North were not all noble. (To wit: Lincoln's 1862 admission: "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.") He posits that the term "slavery" is equally applicable to the life circumstance of some people today, including "highly paid professionals who cannot escape work they consider demeaning or destructive."

Berry stakes out these positions defiantly and with conviction, shrugging off the possibility of a hostile, maybe even legacy-damaging response. As he remarked when my wife, Linda, and I visited Wendell and his wife, Tanya, on their Kentucky farm last fall, "It's too late for it to ruin my entire life." He gave Tanya credit for this witticism.

My own counsel to him at that time, having heard his reports of a hostile early reaction but not seen the book, was that white people like us don't get to say that slavery was not all bad. In an earlier letter, I also argued that it's hard not to consider Robert E. Lee a villain: "He may have fought out of love for his homeland but he also fought to keep slaves in the fields; it's hard for me to see how he, or really anyone who leads others to fight and kill, is heroic. But I will read what you have to say, and perhaps be persuaded."

I did and I have been, with the caveat that Berry never actually describes Lee as heroic; his argument is much more nuanced: "He was an imperfect human being something like me and something like his enemies then and now." It's a fair point, though one that takes a great deal of chutzpah to make.

At 528 pages, The Need to Be Whole is the longest of Berry's more than 50 books (aside from the Library of America's three-volume set of his collected work), and it ranks alongside The Unsettling of America, his seminal 1977 work on the destruction of the family farm and the rural communities that depended on them, as his most important. It is a brave book, one that brings new insight to the discussion of race in America as well as being an urgent appeal for recognizing each other as complex creatures, embodying both good and evil.

The Need to Be Whole elaborates on themes Berry explored in his 1970 book on race, The Hidden Wound. Both argue that racism has a damaging effect on both white people and black people, and that injustices to both races have a deeper cause. He likens the "decline of a small black community in Chicago" to "the decline of the now nearly all-white small towns in my rural county." If both these things are occurring, he says, "then the problem cannot be race prejudice, or only that, but a prejudice of another kind."

He counts Martin Luther King Jr. as an ally in this analysis, saying the civil rights leader's own impulse toward wholeness moved him "from concern for black people to concern for poor people to concern at last for all people, their land and culture." Berry also pulls in the perspectives of others, including writer Ernest J. Gaines, whom Berry knew well, and bell hooks, who visited him at his farm. And while making his definitive life statement on the issue of race, he also explores all of the other issues—including the importance of community, localism, and physical labor—that run constantly through his work. ("Tanya," he relates in the introduction to his 2017 essay collection, The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings, "says my principal asset as a writer has been my knack for repeating myself.")

Berry has lived in Henry County, Kentucky, for almost all his life. It's where his father, John, was a small-town lawyer who helped create a price-support program for tobacco growers. His two children and their families live nearby. In 2011, daughter Mary Berry launched the Berry Center in New Castle, the county seat, to help promote his ideas and teach young farmers what they need to know to give it a go. A small staff runs the center and an adjacent bookstore. Wendell writes in a small shack on stilts overlooking the Kentucky River that he built more than fifty years ago with help from others, as recounted in his essay "The Long-Legged House," part of a 1969 collection of the same name. (The recent flooding that ravaged eastern Kentucky "caused us no problem, Berry wrote me recently, in response to my inquiry. "Here the river raised considerably but stayed in its banks.")

I first met Berry in the fall of 2019, when I traveled from Wisconsin with a colleague to teach a seminar at the University of Louisville, not far from where the Berry's live. That enjoyable visit began an exchange of dozens of letters, some that could be fairly described as contentious, about politics, books, language, ideas, and ways of living. I consider Berry a friend, as he has always identified himself to me in his letters. At the end of my second visit last fall, he grasped my hand and said, "I've called you my friend and now I've made you my friend."

Wendell Berry, I know, has many such friends. I don't.

For all of his genuine dismay at the condition of the world, Berry is an undeniably happy person. He embraces others with his company, enjoying every moment of connection. When he laughs—say, over some anecdote that he has told a thousand times—his whole body shakes, from ankles to shoulders.

While Berry has often drawn controversy, it would be incorrect to say that he has courted it. He is just doggedly determined to stake out positions that he believes are right, even if they offend others. As The Nation examined in a 2019 retrospective on Berry, this includes his view that abortion takes a life (although he does not believe the government should make it illegal).

In my letters to Berry, I have argued, without his explicit agreement or dissent, that much of his work comes down to "the identification of error." He is forever pointing out what has gone wrong, and what must be done to fix it. I noted in one letter how, struck by this insight, I cracked open a copy of his 1992 book, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, more or less at random, and came across this line in the essay "Conservation and Local Economy": "We must give up . . . our superstitious conviction that we can contrive technological solutions to all our problems."

Berry has often mined the past with an eye toward identifying and correcting historical wrongs. In "A Native Hill," his 1968 essay about the land that he calls home, Berry writes:

"I am forever being crept up on and newly startled by the realization that my people established themselves here by killing or driving out the original possessors, by the awareness that people were once bought and sold here by my people, by the sense of the violence they have done to their own kind and to each other and to the earth, by the evidence of their persistent failure to serve either the place or their own community in it."

In The Need to Be Whole, Berry argues that it is not just black descendants of slaves who are entitled to reparations but also to Native Americans and poor rural whites who have been the victims of similar mistreatment. He even finds a reason to sympathize with the plight of their oppressors, saying "The ruling class of the South, by their prejudice against enslaved black people and against the 'degrading' work assigned to them, denied themselves the direct experience of their land and the knowledge of its best use and care."

Berry, himself the descendant of slave owners, says slavery, while morally indefensible, might in its time have been "understood, and experienced by the white and black people involved, as less a merely legal and economic means of exploiting a captive labor force, and more an everyday human relationship." He dares to take this even further, saying a slave on a farm would exist not as an "abstraction of market value" but as "a known person [and] a member of the farm's community of humans and other creatures."

Berry is determined to present people on both sides of the Civil War, as neither all good nor all bad. He rejects the characterization of the Civil War, or any war, as a battle of good vs. evil. He blasts the assertion of historian Jon Meacham, in his book The Soul of America, that the Civil War "was only a chapter in the perennial contest between right and wrong in the nation's soul," as obviously false:

"People of some experience and self-knowledge know that the contest between right and wrong is perennial in the soul of every human, and that right and wrong cannot be geographically divided. People who are somewhat rational are apt to discern also that Southern racism is not categorically worse than Northern racism. During the Civil War, in fact, some people were living in the South who were opposed to slavery and secession, and some people were living in the North who sympathized with the South."

Why is Berry splitting these hairs? To be a contrarian, as usual? Well, yes, but mostly because he thinks that it is his job to reject the simplistic generalizations that allow northerners to dismiss the South as a haven for bigotry while ignoring their own contribution to the problem. He has long pushed back at what he sees as bigotry against Southern people and the agrarian way of life.

"Disparagements of farmers, of small towns, of anything identifiable as 'provincial' can be found everywhere: in comic strips, TV shows, newspaper editorials, literary magazines, and so on," Berry wrote in a 2002 essay, "The Prejudice Against Country People," published in The Progressive. After giving some examples of this disparagement, including a 1986 article in The New Republic called "The Idiocy of Rural Life," Berry steps back and says:

"Am I trying to argue that all small farmers are superior or that they are all good farmers or that they live the 'idyllic life'? I certainly am not. And that is my point. The sentimental stereotype is just as damaging as the negative one. The image of the farmer as the salt of the earth, independent son of the soil, and child of nature is a sort of lantern slide projected over the image of the farmer as simpleton, hick, or redneck. Both images serve to obliterate any concept of farming as an ancient, useful, honorable vocation, requiring admirable intelligence and skill, a complex local culture, great patience and endurance, and moral responsibilities of the gravest kind."

This is the essential wisdom of Wendell Berry: Things are complicated. Dividing the world into a simplistic dichotomy of good and evil, he cautions in The Need to Be Whole, "forbids actual thought or discourse about moral issues, as it forbids self-knowledge, humor, and forgiveness."

Indeed, the concept of forgiveness is central to Berry's book, as embodied in literary and historic examples. These include the mercy shown by Achilles to Priam, father of the slain Hector, in The Iliad. Not content with simply killing Hector for killing his best friend, Achilles vents his rage by dragging Hector's body through the streets of Troy until Priam kneels before him to beg for his son's remains. The greatest beneficiary of this kindness is not Priam but Achilles. "It is Priam who makes Achilles, his enemy, whole," Berry reflects.

This is the same mercy that Berry seeks for the soldiers of the Confederacy. Yes, the war and the reasons for it were shameful. But so was the war in Vietnam, where the "opprobrium" attached to the U.S. soldiers who fought it was equally unjust. "I cannot think of any good reason," Berry writes, "why right-thinking and peace-loving people cannot oppose the bad policies of one side of a bad war and yet regard with compassion and respect the young soldiers of both sides whose only lives were expended in suffering and death."

On the issue of war, Berry, a detester of absolutes, stakes out an absolutist position: War is never just, and it is always a bad idea. Even if the Civil War were "probably the only way" to stop slavery and reunite the nation, which he disputes, he would not condone it. The consequences in terms of ongoing resentments and prejudices, which Berry argues continue into the present day, have been too great.

Berry brings the same fierce iconoclasm to a range of other issues, always eager to take a poke at those caught up in the orthodoxies of the moment. He lampoons the "so-called liberals" who consider themselves as lovers of nature and protectors of the environment and yet have never objected to "the abandonment and ruin of rural America, or to the plunder and waste of natural resources." They object to burning fossil fuels because of climate change, but also "wish to be air-conditioned and overheated, overfed and underworked, and above all . . . driving their cars."

In his recent letter to me, Berry noted that the flooding in eastern Kentucky had been attributed, "over and over," to global warming, rather than the state-sanctioned surface mining that made the conditions for flooding worse. "Climate change is an irresistible convenience, for it can be blamed on nobody in particular, and this spares official Kentucky the burden of its complicity in the larger-scale ruin of the land of our poor state."

Berry sees the destruction of land as the greatest of evils, one that "cannot be corrected solely by power or politics or technology or money," concepts that are "as fragmented and scattered as ourselves. I believe that the correction must be love, and I mean the practical love-until-death of neighbors and country. Such love and nothing else could reverse the industrial 'process' of separating everything from everything. Such love, even before it accomplished very much, could make us whole and free."

Such is the cause to which Wendell Berry has devoted his life, and intends to keep doing so. While it is difficult not to conclude, given the realities of the human condition, that this will be his last big book, his sights remain set on the future, and on the prospect, however dim, of salvation. As he writes at one point:

"I suppose that, as long as life enough is in me, I will continue to oppose the great harms that have come to the land and people of this country, which of course includes the cities that have so much depended on it and so little cared for it. And I will continue to advocate, and to point out, better ways. If that requires repeating myself, as I often have done, so be it. But as I repeat myself, maybe I will continue to learn a little more and then a little more about what is wrong and what would be right."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Bill Lueders.

The death of Queen Elizabeth II, the longest-serving monarch of British royalty, has sparked global fascination and spawned thousands of clickbait reports of the details of her funeral. Americans, who centuries ago rejected monarchy, are seemingly obsessed with the ritualism, bizarrely mourning the demise of an elderly and fabulously wealthy woman who was born into privilege and who died of natural causes at the ripe old age of 96 across the ocean.

Perhaps this is because popular and long-running TV shows about British royalty like “The Crown” have convinced us that we know intimate details about the royals—and worse, they cause us to believe we should care about a family that is a symbolic marker of past imperial grandeur.

But for those who are descended from the subjects of British imperialist conquest, the queen, her ancestors, and her descendants represent the ultimate evil empire.

India, my home country, celebrated its 75th anniversary of independencefrom British rule this year. Both my parents were born before independence, into a nation still ruled by the British. I heard many tales while growing up of my grandfather’s absences from home as he went “underground,” wanted for seditious activity against the British. After independence in 1947, he was honored for being a “freedom fighter” against the monarchy.

Despite the popularity and critical acclaim of “The Crown” and movies and shows like it, I found a far stronger connection to the new superhero series “Ms. Marvel,” if for no other reason than the fact that it tackles the horrors of partition, a little-known (in the U.S.) legacy of the evil empire.

As Pakistani writer Minna Jaffery-Lindemulder explains in New Lines, “The British changed the borders of India and Pakistan at the eleventh hour in 1947 before declaring both nations independent, leaving the former subjects of the crown confused about where they needed to migrate to ensure their safety.” As a result, 15 million people felt forced to move from one part of the South Asian subcontinent to another, a mass cross-exodus with an estimated death toll ranging from half a million to 2 million.

Today, those contested borders, callously and recklessly drawn in 1947 by British officials acting at the behest of the crown, remain a source of simmering tensions between India and Pakistan that occasionally erupt into full-blown wars.

This is the legacy of British monarchy. The United Kingdom enjoys a hideous distinction in the Guinness Book of World Records, for “most countries [62] to have gained independence from the same country.”

One could argue that Elizabeth, who was gifted the throne and its title in 1952, did not lead an aggressive empire of conquest and instead presided over an institution that, under her rule, became largely symbolic and ceremonial in nature. And indeed, many do just that, referring to her, for example, as an “exemplar of moral decency.”

Rahul Mahajan, author of Full Spectrum Dominance and The New Crusade, has a different opinion, referring in an interview to Elizabeth as a “morally unremarkable person with a job that involved doing extremely unremarkable things.”

Mahajan explains further, saying that this was “a highly privileged person, given an opportunity to influence world events in some degree, which she had to do nothing to earn, who never did anything particularly remarkable, innovative, or insightful.”

While Elizabeth’s 70 years on the throne were mostly spent overseeing an ostensible unraveling of British Empire in a world less tolerant of occupation, enslavement, and imperial plunder, just a few months into her role as queen, the British violently put down the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. According to a New York Times story about how citizens in African nations today have little sympathy for the dead monarch, the squashing of the rebellion “led to the establishment of a vast system of detention camps and the torture, rape, castration and killing of tens of thousands of people.”

Even if Elizabeth was not responsible for directing the horrors, they were carried out in her name. Over the seven decades that she wielded symbolic power, she never once apologized for what was done during her rule in Kenya—or indeed what was done in her family’s name in dozens of other nations in the Global South.

It’s no wonder that Black and Brown people the world over have openly expressed disgust at the collective fawning of such an ugly legacy.

Professor Uju Anya of Carnegie Mellon University, who is Nigerian, is under fire for her frank dismissal of Elizabeth after posting on Twitter that she “heard the chief monarch of a thieving and raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.”

Kehinde Andrews, a Black studies professor at Birmingham City University, wrote on Politico that he cannot relate to his fellow Britons’ desire to mourn Elizabeth, a woman he considered to be “the number one symbol of white supremacy” and a “manifestation of the institutional racism that we have to encounter on a daily basis.”

Elizabeth may have appeared a benign, smiling elder who maintained the propriety expected from a royal leader. But she worked hard to preserve an institution that should have long ago died out. She was handed the throne after her uncle, the duke of Windsor, abdicated in order to marry a twice-divorced American. Both the marriage to a divorcee and the fact that the couple turned out to be Nazi sympathizers marked a low point for the royals.

“The monarchy was in a really good position to fade away with this kind of clowning around,” says Mahajan. But it was Elizabeth who “rescued the popularity of the monarchy.”

Further, Elizabeth quietly preserved the ill-gotten family fortune that she and her descendants benefitted from in a postcolonial world. “One thing she could, and of course should, have done and said something about is the massive royal estate,” says Mahajan. Observers can only estimate the royal family’s worth (Forbes puts the figure at $28 billion), assets that include stolen jewels from former colonies, pricey art investments, and real estate holdings across Britain.

Britain’s new king, Charles III, now inherits the fruits of the evil empire. According to Mahajan, Charles “is apparently very bent on taking his fortune and investing it in such a way as to make himself as rich as possible.” According to the New York Times, “As prince, Charles used tax breaks, offshore accounts and canny real estate investments to turn a sleepy estate into a billion-dollar business.”

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in 2017 found that both Elizabeth and Charles were named in the leaked “Paradise Papers,” indicating that they hid their money in havens to avoid paying taxes.

Fleecing taxpayers and living off stolen wealth—monarchy’s original modus operandi appears to be central to Elizabeth’s legacy, one she passes on to her son (who also won’t pay an inheritance tax on the wealth she left him).

The British monarchy, according to Mahajan, “mostly represents a real concession to the idea that some people are just born better and more important than you, and you should look to them.

Mahajan adds, “It’s a good time for the popularity of this institution to fade away.”

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Sonali Kolhatkar.

On Monday state-controlled media quoted the Hai Phong City Police as saying the “Jesus Church” is operating in many localities without permission. The Government Committee for Religious Affairs has not yet recognized the “Jesus Church” as a religious organization, the news organizations said.

All religious groups in Vietnam are required to obtain government approval, otherwise they are banned.

The “Jesus Church” is concentrated in provinces including Dien Bien, Lai Chau, Son La, Lao Cai, Yen Bai, and Thanh Hoa.

It was founded around five years ago, according to the Ministry of Public Security, which called it an “evil religion,” saying it was concerned about the rapid growth of the church among the Hmong community. 

The ethnic group originally followed animist beliefs but many Hmong converted to Christianity in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Hai Phong City Police Department said there are about 100 Hmong people living there and, although they were not “Jesus Church” followers they had issued a warning to try to stop them joining the religion.

Police said the “Jesus Church” was founded by a man calling himself David Her whose real name is Ho Cha Sung. The department said he is a Hmong from Xiangkhoang province in Laos, currently living in California.

In April, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) issued a proposal to put Vietnam back on the list of countries of special concern for not respecting religious freedom, saying the government continues to persecute independent religious communities.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Vietnamese.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Lou Ferreira.

“A man may give up a right, but he may not give up a duty without being guilty of a grave dereliction.”

– Mahatma Gandhi

Recorded and live testimony before eight hearings of the House Jan.6 committee ripped open Donald Trump’s intensive, unyielding efforts to retain the presidency under false pretenses that could lead to criminal charges.

One of the latest disclosures at Thursday night’s final hearing of the summer – more are expected in September — focused on how the president of the United States did nothing for three hours and seven minutes as his army of supporters, some armed, tore through the Capitol, hunting for Vice President Mike Pence with the goal of hanging him. The noose stood ready outside the building.

Instead of ending the violent riot staged at his instigation and on his behalf in an attempted coup, Trump watched the bloody assault unfold on Fox “News” in the small dining room off the Oval Office.

Testimony showed that he didn’t tell the rioters to stop and go home until it became clear that invading the

Capitol was a losing proposition. Certifying Joe Biden as the 46th president came hours later.

When a Pentagon official called to determine how to react to the assault, a White House lawyer, Eric Herschmann, told White House counsel Pat A. Cipollone, “The president didn’t want anything done” [to stop the siege]. Herschmann was relaying information from an unidentified White House official.

“You’re the commander in chief,” Gen. Mark A. Milley, the military’s top gun as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the committee. “You’ve got an assault going on on the Capitol of the United States of America and there’s nothing? No call? Nothing? Zero?”

That’s right, nothing, despite repeated entreaties by aides and Trump’s daughter Ivanka for the president to tell the thugs to call off the attack. Their begging went unheeded as the rioters beat their way into the biggest symbol of American democracy and swarmed through its highly polished corridor floors.

If Trump’s refusal to halt the unremitting barrage against the Capitol isn’t a violation of his oath office and thus a dereliction of duty, I don’t know what is. The oath:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Dereliction, which usually is applied to the military, is defined as “the abandonment of a thing, person or obligation.” The president is the civilian head of the military as its commander in chief.

The big question, of course, is whether the committee will recommend to Attorney General Merrick Garland to take criminal action against Trump, and possibly against some of his associates. Then it will be up to Garland, whose agency is conducting its own investigation, whether to prosecute.

He keeps saying no one is above the law. I’d like to see him prove it.

“Every person who is criminally responsible” will be chargeable and “no person is above the law in this country,” Garland said last week.

Sounds good. But words are cheap. Let’s hope it happens. The storming of the Capitol wasn’t an innocent romp of tourists, as Rep. Andrew S. Clyde, R-Ga., once tried to whitewash the melee as a “normal tourist visit.”

“There needs to be accountability, accountability under the law, accountability to the American people, accountability at every level,” the panel chair, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said.

“If there is no accountability for Jan. 6, for every part of this scheme, I fear we will not overcome the ongoing threat to our democracy,” he said. “There must be stiff consequences for those responsible.”

Accountability occasionally is imposed. A U.S. District Court convicted Trump’s guru and far-right podcaster, Stephen K. Bannon, of contempt of Congress for ignoring a subpoena to testify and provide documents to the Jan. 6 committee. It could mean prison.

The nine-member committee, which includes two Republicans, has been investigating the desecration of the Capitol for about a year. It seeks to prove Trump spurred the rioters on, put a target on Pence’s back by declaring his vice president refused his pleas to falsify the election results, knew he lost the contest even though he repeatedly lied about it and tried through various means to overthrow the government.

The objective is to put Trump on trial in court, not only in a congressional hearing, so he will face consequences for his actions.

“. . . We as Americans must all agree on this: Donald Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6 was a supreme violation of [his] oath of office and a complete dereliction of his duty to our nation,” said Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., who co-chaired the hearing.

“It is a stain on our history, it is a dishonor to all those who have sacrificed and died in service to our democracy. When we present our full findings we will recommend changes to laws and policies to guard against another Jan. 6.”

 Trump has teased that he will run again in 2024, possibly the trigger that prompted Kinzinger to warn that the anger over a lost election and die-hard support for the former president demonstrated at the Capitol still exists.

“They’re still out there, ready to go,” the congressman said. “That’s the elephant in the room .”

Elephants are known to stampede.

Kinzinger’s Republican co-chair, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who often denounced Trump at the risk of her career, took another tack against Trump in a bid to ensure he won’t be permitted to run for any public office again.

“Every American must consider this,” she told the prime-time televised hearing. “Can a president who is willing to make the choices Donald Trump made during the violence of Jan. 6 ever be trusted with any position of authority in our great nation again?”

Stephanie Grisham, who worked for Trump as press secretary, resigned Jan. 6 in opposition to the siege of the Capitol.

“I don’t think I can rebrand,” she told New York magazine. “I think this will follow me forever. I believe I was part of something unusually evil.”

Amen. Now is the time for an exorcism.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Richard C. Gross.

A survivor of the August 9, 1945 bombing of the Japanese city of Nagasaki by the United States conveyed the inhumanity of atomic weapons on Monday ahead of an international meeting that seeks to eliminate the world's growing nuclear arsenal.

"We have continued to appeal to the world for the abolition of nuclear weapons and for a world without war."

"The atomic bomb is a weapon of inhumanity and of absolute evil, with which human beings cannot exist and which does not allow us to even live or die as human beings," said Sueichi Kido, 82, after describing what happened when the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on his city just three days after it had already annihilated Hiroshima.

The U.S. remains the only country to have deployed a nuclear weapon against a civilian population during wartime.

Survivors' pain and post-traumatic stress is "not something that fades away, but something which continues through their lives," Kido, secretary-general of the Japan Confederation of A- and H-bomb Sufferers Organizations, said through an interpreter at the Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons.

The one-day conference, hosted by the Austrian government, precedes a three-day summit in Vienna—the first Meeting of States Parties to the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) since the United Nations pact came into force last January.

The world's nine nuclear-armed states, including the U.N. Security Council's five permanent members—Russia, the United States, China, France, and the United Kingdom—as well as Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea, have refused to support the TPNW and won't take part in this week's historic gathering.

Despite being the only nation to experience the catastrophic destruction wrought by a nuclear attack, Japan has also not signed the treaty. Furthermore, Kyodo News reported Monday that Tokyo officials have decided not to participate in this week's summit, even as observers.

While the Japanese government will not be there, a large number of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors are expected to attend.

Suzuka Nakamura, a 22-year-old university student whose grandmother was exposed to radioactive waste from the bomb in Nagasaki, also spoke at Monday's conference as part of Japan's delegation.

It is "up to us," she said, "to remember the horror of the atomic bombings and to prevent repetition of the same mistakes in the future."

Referring to Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine, Nakamura noted that "now people of Ukraine and the world are horrified by Russian President [Vladimir] Putin's threat to use nuclear weapons in the current war."

Kido, for his part, said that "we have continued to appeal to the world for the abolition of nuclear weapons and for a world without war."

"The treaty embodies this very aspiration," he continued, adding that he hopes the upcoming meeting of signatories to the TPNW—which seeks to outlaw the development, possession, testing, and use of nuclear weapons—is successful.

Sofia Wolman, campaign manager of the Nuclear Ban Treaty Collaborative, explained in a recent statement that "countries that join the TPNW are legally obligated to provide victim assistance to affected communities."

"For the U.S., ratification would mean finally acknowledging the people exposed to the first nuclear weapon ever used, and their descendants," said Wolman, alluding to the thousands of victims of the Trinity Test conducted in New Mexico on July 16, 1945.

Tina Cordova, co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, described how that explosion "produced more heat than the sun, and caused radioactive ash to fall for days—covering and contaminating crops, homes, bodies, and water supplies."

"We were innocent children, women, and men who were left to deal with the horrid consequences of being overexposed to radioactive fallout," said Cordova. "Our families suffer from cancer, radiation-related illnesses, and early death."

"The people of New Mexico have been waiting over 77 years," Cordova continued. "We have never been acknowledged although we were the original downwinders, the first people to be exposed to a nuclear bomb and nuclear fallout anyplace in the world."

"We have been casualties of the U.S. government's quest for nuclear superiority," she added. "There is so much more to the history than what the U.S. government has been willing to share, and we were the human sacrifice."

Mary Dickson, another American downwinder who is attending this week's events in Vienna, described herself in a recent Common Dreams essay as "a casualty of the Cold War, a survivor of nuclear weapons testing."

"Growing up in Salt Lake City, Utah during the Cold War I was repeatedly exposed to dangerous levels of radioactive fallout from hundreds of detonations at the Nevada Test Site just 65 miles west of Las Vegas," she wrote. "A government that knowingly harms its own citizens must be held accountable. Our lives are worth more than civilization-ending weapons. It's a simple matter of priorities and justice."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

“We the people are the rightful masters of the Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.”

Abraham Lincoln

The sitting president of a mighty nation founded on a body of laws, Donald J. Trump, agreed with his rabid army storming the hallowed Capitol that his ultra-loyal vice president, Mike Pence, should be hanged.

It’s what Pence “deserved,” Trump said, according to testimony before the House committee investigating the unprecedented Jan. 6, 2021 intention by Americans inspired to overthrow their newly elected government by thwarting the certification of Joe Biden as their president.

In a sane world, that should be enough to mark the end of narcissistic egomaniac Trump’s political ambitions and put him on his tasteless gold-colored escalator back up to his to his New York tower. He descended the thing June 16, 2015 to announce his candidacy.

It shouldn’t matter even if he isn’t charged with seditious conspiracy for leading his “patriot” supporters on a rampage that committee Chair Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., rightly labeled an “attempted coup.”

But Trump should be charged as a criminal based on the committee’s evidence gathered through more than 1,000 interviews and more than 140,000 documents.

“Donald Trump was at the center of this conspiracy,” Thompson said. “And ultimately, Donald Trump, the president of the United States, spurred a mob of domestic enemies of the Constitution to march down the Capitol and subvert American democracy.”

The New York Post, a conservative tabloid that once endorsed Trump for president but urged him to “end the insanity” over his Big Lie that he won reelection, now charges that he’s “unworthy for the office” for agreeing to hang Pence.

“Trump can’t look past 2020,” it said. “Let him remain there.”

Amen.

We have been living through a political horror show with a deranged, chaotic Trump as he inexorably, truly and accurately became what New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd described Saturday as an “American monster.” She’s reading Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” applying it to reality.

The Times has reported that two former White House staffers testified before the Jan. 6 panel that Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, told them he heard the president say Pence should be hanged – his own vice president, a man as loyal to his boss as a puppy for four years.

“Aware of the rioters’ chants to ‘hang Mike Pence,’ the president responded with this sentiment: ‘Maybe our supporters have the right idea’ and Mike Pence ‘deserves’ it,” committee Vice Chair Rep. Liz Cheney, a Republican from Wyoming, told about 20 million people watching the first of the powerful hearings Thursday night.

This endorsement to hang his vice president is evil incarnate at the highest level of America, a profile of just what kind of wicked individual lived in the people’s house for four years.

It took Trump 187 minutes to release a video in which he called on his rioters to stop swarming through the halls of Congress like angry charging elephants, beating police, smashing windows and doors and causing seven deaths during and after the siege, two by suicide, one from a stroke, another from a heart attack.

This is what the Republican National Committee characterized as a ”legitimate political discourse.” Rep. Andrew Clyde, Republican of Georgia, described the melee as “a normal tourist visit.”

And Trump acolyte, defender and buddy of Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán Tucker Carlson of Fox “News,” termed the violent terrorist insurrection “forgettably minor” and “vandalism.”

“What I saw was a war scene,” testified Caroline Edwards of the Capitol Police, one of more than 150 police officers wounded in the attack. ”I saw officers on the ground. They were bleeding. They were throwing up. I was slipping on people’s blood. It was carnage. It was chaos.”

But Trump, who began his presidency by describing  his country as wallowing in “American carnage,” ended his video by sending his storm troopers his “love” and cooed that they were “very special people.”

They sure were. About 850 of them have been charged with crimes in connection with the assault on the Capitol, the first such attack since the British set fire to it in 1814. It never was attacked during four years of Civil War.

There will be more hearings, some during daytimes when most people will be at work, unfortunately. Prime times should have been reserved for the most significant hearings since the early 1970s Watergate scandal. This time, it’s our very democracy at stake.

Cheney, daughter of a former vice president who has been ostracized by her own party for speaking out against Trump’s irrepressible lying, knitted an airtight prosecutorial package that illustrated with little doubt that the siege of the Capitol was far from a spontaneous outburst. It had been planned in advance with the help of Trump’s militias and some of his diehard supporters.

“President Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack,” she said.

This wasn’t the Boston Tea Party of Dec. 16, 1773 when colonists angry about “taxation without representation” dumped 342 chests of British-shipped tea into Boston Harbor. That was patriotism.

It was the Proud Boys hate group whom Trump urged to “stand back and standby” during a debate with Biden moderated by Chris Wallace on Sept. 29, 2020, when Wallace asked Trump if he would condemn white supremacists.

A grand jury has since charged Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and four associates with seditious conspiracy, a serious crime a step below treason.

Attempts to overthrow the government such as the Capitol insurrection cannot stand, not if we want a stable country so we can continue to live the freedoms for which millions of our countrymen have died in our own war and far-flung conflicts in which we had no business getting involved.

If we leave ourselves open to further insurrections – if there is no accountability for Jan. 6, if no new laws are passed so this doesn’t happen again – if a former president is permitted to avoid responsibility for instigating an attack on the Constitution he swore to “preserve, protect and defend” (he did everything but in his four godforsaken years in power), then another assault on who we are is bound to occur.

Soon it will be up to Attorney General Merrick Garland to decide whether to bring criminal charges against Trump and others who helped plan the biggest crime against America since the Confederacy bombarded Fort Sumpter in South Carolina April 12, 1861, igniting the Civil War.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Richard C. Gross.

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