We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Thursday, April 24, 2014

Does Washington want war with Russia?

Click here to access article by Bill Van Auken from World Socialist Web Site.
Presumably, those in the White House and the Pentagon believe that such a conflict would stop short of a nuclear war, but who knows?

The threat of a US war on Russia is also apparent in the flood of war propaganda being unleashed upon the public. Vladimir Putin is being subjected to the same kind of demonization previously reserved for Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, while the State Department and its faithful scribes at the New York Times serve up “photographic evidence” of Russian troops in Ukraine that has all the authenticity of similar “proofs” of Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction.”
What underlies the US war drive?
Van Auken then attempts to provide some answers.

Many others are speculating on the super-aggressive actions which are accompanied by the most outrageous hypocritical propaganda supported by altered photos much as we saw in the run-up to the Iraq War. For example, the anonymous blogger "The Saker" compares the lies of Empire agents to those of the nomenclatura of the late Soviet Union which led to the downfall of that regime; and he predicts the same will happen to the US Empire.