Lo and behold, a great threat looms over the Middle East. There is nothing worse for the US and its select allies, Britain, France, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Germany than peace breaking out. Yet exactly that, the “threat of peace” is taken as far more devastating than terrorism.And he asks a final unanswered question:
America’s biggest enemy in the Middle East today isn’t ISIS, for those who pay attention, more effort has been made by the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and to be honest about it, a host of other nations as well, to save ISIS and al Qaeda from the “axis of evil” than any military effort since Vietnam.
We are, to be honest still, in our eighth year of a war to keep terrorism alive.
Why would someone want discord and suffering on a global scale? Is money and power really worth it?This is another confirmation of the theme I have been hammering for the past several years: the capitalist ruling classes behind the Empire are a driven lot. They are thoroughly addicted to the power that capitalism delivers to them via concentrated wealth. Because of this addiction to power, this question becomes irrelevant. The addiction must be satisfied regardless of the consequences which are horrendous. The real question is: are we ordinary people going to tolerate this any longer? Are we prepared to endure whatever "slings and arrows" that we might experience in the immediate future in order to save us from horrors that await us in the long run?
He [Trump] finally ordered his forces to do so after long months of inaction, during which the US effectively offered protection to the terror group and allowed tens of thousands of ISIS militants to move freely to attack the Syrian Army and its allies along the Deir-ezzour al-Bukamal axis. [northeastern Syria]
The significance of Trump’s decision to finally move against ISIS cannot be overestimated. Since 2014 the US has been engaged in a phoney war against ISIS, pretending to fight this brutal takfiri group while in fact allowing it to expand and killing Syrian Army soldiers who actually fought the group. Throughout this time the US has used ISIS as a pretext for the US military presence in Syria. The US did bomb ISIS occupied Raqqah and destroyed it; it then made a deal to deport many thousands of ISIS partisans. But the ongoing Battle of Baghuz marks the first time the US has really fought ISIS. To his credit, Trump is now doing what the US has only pretended to do for five years: actually fighting ISIS. This spectacular and drawn out campaign allows Trump to take credit for defeating ISIS, although for half a decade the forces actually fighting ISIS have been the Syrian Army, Russia, the Iraqi PMU/Hashed al-Shaabi, the Iraqi Army, Lebanese Hezbollah, and Iran.
What might ... be the End of Everything, or might lead us down the road to the End of Everything, is if otherwise intelligent human beings continue to allow themselves to be whipped into fits of mass hysteria and run around behaving like a mindless herd of propaganda-regurgitating zombies whenever the global capitalist ruling classes tell them that “the Russians are coming!” or that “the Nazis are coming!” or that “the Terrorists are coming!”
The Russo-Nazi Terrorists are not coming. The global capitalist ruling classes are putting down a populist insurgency, delegitimizing any and all forms of dissent from their global capitalist ideology and resistance to the hegemony of global capitalism. In the process, they are conditioning people to completely abandon their critical faculties and behave like twitching Pavlovian idiots who will obediently respond to whatever stimuli or blatantly fabricated propaganda the corporate media bombards them with.
Sixteen years have passed and the memory of the Iraq War is distant for many, save for the millions of people — Iraqi and American alike — who saw their lives destroyed by one of the greatest lies ever sold to the American public.The ruling class engineers this lack of caring by 1) controlling our thoughts about what is happening in the world; and 2) by keeping us dumbed-down, distracted, and entertained.
Yet, while plenty of Americans sleep easy thinking that such an atrocity as the invasion and occupation of Iraq could never happen again, the U.S. government has continuously been involved in many smaller, equally disastrous wars — both seen and unseen — largely thanks to the fact that those who brought us the Iraq War remain both respected and still present in the halls of power.
Indeed, the only thing the domestic outrage over the Iraq War seemed to accomplish has been a massive effort waged by the government and the corporate elite to engineer a public that doesn’t complain and doesn’t care when their government meddles or invades another country.
Captain Marvel is truly “corporate entertainment”—i.e., the very process by which it came into being prevents it from being entertaining or enlightening in any meaningful fashion.
This type of large-scale, officially sponsored filmmaking, whose success is avidly promoted and tracked by the media and business publications in particular, inevitably intersects and overlaps with other aspects of American establishment culture. In the case of Captain Marvel, this means militarism and feminism specifically.
The US Air Force was involved in the production of Captain Marvel.
French camera operator Julien Rogue, who was present on March 16th in Paris when the Yellow Vests made it clear to Macron that his fake “grand debate” will not succeed to sweep national discontent under the carpet, has made and published a 24-minute film entitled “Into the storm: At the heart of a popular revolution”, the introductory text of which is translated and presented below…
A film created in the heart of act 18 of the Yellow Vests in Paris on March 16th 2019. I bring you with me on this totally incredible day, where chaos mixes with hope, witnessing extraordinary violence, immersion in the heart of Paris, but also, through the spectrum of my lens, to relive this day, which will go down in the history as one of the most violent of the Yellow Vests movement. I wanted to make a summary of what I experienced during act 18 in Paris, but then… I didn’t have the words.
So, in the face of so many things to say and so much to describe, I preferred to leave room for images, showing all that I could film through this film.
It is precisely because of their willingness to succeed that the “masses” isolate anything that could divide them or have a negative impact on the movement’s further development. For example, despite the fact that 70% of the demands of the movement are identical to the political programme of the left-wing “France Insoumise”, the Vests have so far prevented it from playing any significant role in their activities, keeping their distance from it.
Hence, in France, at present, we see the development of a movement which seems to be very “left-wing” in terms of principles, ideas, demands, values or slogans, but which does not wish to be called “left”.
Besides, the “radicalism” of French society, as in other western countries, is manifested towards both the “radical left” and the “radical right” and in the ranks of the Yellow Vest movement one can find supporters and even cadres of parties from both ends of the political spectrum, as well as apolitical citizens. Thus, if the Yellow Vests were to start expressing any political party preferences, they would automatically lose part of the support they enjoy, becoming an easy target for their opponents and undermining their struggle.
Specifically, in April 1967, the CIA wrote a dispatch which coined the term “conspiracy theories” … and recommended methods for discrediting such theories. The dispatch was marked “psych” – short for “psychological operations” or disinformation – and “CS” for the CIA’s “Clandestine Services” unit.
The dispatch was produced in responses to a Freedom of Information Act request by the New York Times in 1976.
The dispatch states:
Before commenting on the current political crisis, how would you describe the social and economic crisis in Venezuela today?
This question leads to a very long answer, so I apologise if it gets tiresome. The economic and social crisis has grown exponentially for about five years now, and has got to this rotten state of hyper-inflation that we’re barely coping with, and which is breaking world records. This is the cause for the huge discontent that we have at this stage and for the important change in the correlation of political power in this juncture. In my opinion this is a consequence of three fundamental facts: two of them circumstantial, and one structural.
... when it comes to JPMorgan Chase and law enforcement, there does not seem to be a morsel of curiosity over the continuing sudden deaths of its computer technology workers – no matter how high up the corporate ladder they rank or how many floors they are alleged to fall to their death.
We’re being led to believe it’s all doom and gloom in Venezuela. The mainstream media is rapid-firing reports of a deepening humanitarian crisis. An evil dictator, Nicolas Maduro, is holding his country hostage from democracy, they say, while his people starve. Venezuelans are reportedly fleeing by the thousands while the government blocks «aid» shipments from the U.S.’ ally, Colombia. And almost every day, a quick google search will bring you new «news» articles claiming Maduro will be overthrown by his own people sooner than you can say "Hands Off Venezuela".You may also be interested in an article entitled "Venezuela Coup Leader's Oil Plans Revealed: GuaidĂł Hopes to Privatize State-Controlled Industry" by Ben Norton from The Grayzone.
... Israeli murderers gun down Palestinians who peacefully demand what is due to them as human beings, and this passes without comment by the self-proclaimed defenders of the rule of law. In Western capitals, the only discussion about Israel is one pivoting on the contrived concept of the ‘new’ anti-Semitism, an all too transparent ploy to suppress criticism of Al Capone’s crimes, while John Dillinger gets on with robbing Venezuela of its treasure trove of oil and gold.
British photojournalist Alan Gignoux and Venezuelan journalist-filmmaker Carolina Graterol, both based in London, went to Venezuela for a month to shoot a documentary for a major global TV channel. They talked with journalist Paul Cochrane about the mainstream media’s portrayal of Venezuela compared to their experiences on the ground.
Some environmental activists argue the only way to stop the impending ecocide is to carry out nonviolent acts of civil disobedience to shut down the capitals of the major industrial countries, crippling commerce and transportation until the ruling elites are forced to publicly state the truth about climate catastrophe, implement radical measure to halt carbon emissions by 2025, and empower an independent citizens committee to oversee the termination of our 150-year binge on fossil fuels. UK-based group Extinction Rebellion has called for nonviolent acts of civil disobedience on April 15 in capitals around the world to reverse our “one-way track to extinction.” Joining Chris Hedges in the second part of a two-part discussion from London is Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion.