Lenin sweeping the world clean
View of the world – up to end of 2022
Ukraine – what you weren’t told – 2022
Ukraine – what you weren’t told – 2023
The Ukraine – what you are not told – 2024
View of the world – 2023
There are many articles published each day which provide an interesting (and often insightful) analysis of the world in which we live – and how capitalism and imperialism manipulates populations and circumstances for its own financial gain.
Some might find a home in other pages on this blog but others are metaphorical ‘orphans’. This page seeks to provide them a home.
The Iranian Uprising and the Cycles of Protest. (2nd January 2023)
The UK’s 83 military interventions around the world since 1945 (10th January 2023)
Britain has deployed its armed forces for combat over 80 times in 47 countries since the end of the Second World War, in episodes ranging from brutal colonial wars and covert operations to efforts to prop up favoured governments or to deter civil unrest.
Britain’s 42 coups since 1945. (12th January 2023)
The UK has planned or executed over 40 attempts to remove foreign governments in 27 countries since the end of the Second World War, involving the intelligence agencies, covert and overt military interventions and assassinations, Declassified has found.
It turns out Hillary Clinton, not Russian bots, lost the 2016 Election. (13th January 2023)
A new study of Russia-based Twitter posts by New York University researchers buries the liberal canard that Russian bots played any significant role in swinging the 2016 election for Donald Trump.
The richest 1% of people amassed almost two-thirds of new wealth created in the last two years, Oxfam says. (16th January 2023)
When journalists act as state propagandists. (18th January 2023)
In advance of the invasion of Iraq 20 years ago, the UK media parroted government lies and fabrications uncritically and became an enthusiastic part of the state’s propaganda machine. An inquiry into British reporting of the Iraq war is well past due.
Ashes of empire: Britain’s burning injustice in Kenya. (19th January 2023)
Six decades after colonial rule ended in Kenya, British troops that remain in the East African nation are being accused of massive environmental damage. Thousands of rural Kenyans are fighting for justice in a landmark community campaign.
Why the British army used heavy artillery to kill thousands of Londoners in the early 1940s. (26th January 2023) – video
Why is Venezuela’s gold still frozen in the Bank of England? (27th January 2023)
Four years ago, the UK government recognised Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s president. He’s now gone, but the Bank of England is still holding some of the country’s key assets.
Latin America coming together (31st January 2023) – video
Yes, Britain is corrupt. but it’s a lot worse than you think. (1st February 2023)
This article raises a critical issue that applies to the US and most advanced economies: high level de facto bribery is see as routine, while slipping a $20 into your US passport so the customs officer in Cuba won’t stamp it is corrupt. In the US context, it would be seen as totally out of bounds to try to pay a cop not to issue a speeding ticket, yet it’s OK for police to engage in occasional hyper-vigilant and arguably overreaching traffic and nuisance fines….until it reaches extortionate scale and produces unforeseen Ferguson-type blowback.
Asking the oppressed to be nonviolent Is an impossible standard that ignores history. (17th February 2023)
It may well be that the circumstances where nonviolent protest can succeed are more limited than Gandhi and Martin Luther King fans would have you believe. Getting a ruling elite to cede significant power historically does seem to require violence. Ask the Visgoths in 476 AD, who I understand stormed Rome after seeking the same status as Roman citizens following many years of doing their dirty work. Or the French after 1789; Simon Schama in his account Citizens stresses the incredible violence of the revolutionary period. Or the Communist Revolution…
The endgame of the Cuban Missile Crisis – Part 1 (18th February 2023)
Most of the documents in this posting are never-before-published records discovered at the U.S. National Archives among the State Department’s central files and the records of the U.S. Embassy in Rome.
Secret power and the persecution of Julian Assange. (4th March 2023)
Assange, who hasn’t been found guilty, is being treated on a par with a convicted Hannibal Lechter level serial killer. An objective of his torture during his pre-trial detention appears to be to render him incapable of assisting in his defense.
Greece’s tragic rail accident was caused by austerity and privatization. (8th March 2023)
Last week, two trains collided in central Greece, claiming 57 lives. Unions had long warned that cuts to the now-privatized rail network would cause a severe accident, but neither the government nor the country’s corporate media heeded the calls.
The surprising history of International Women’s Day. (8th March 2023)
Though International Women’s Day may be more widely celebrated abroad than in the United States, its roots are planted firmly in American soil where efforts were made to separate it from its socialist origins.
The Betrayers of Assange – John Pilger (10th March 2023)
I have known Julian Assange since I first interviewed him in London in 2010. I immediately liked his dry, dark sense of humour, often dispensed with an infectious giggle. He is a proud outsider: sharp and thoughtful. We have become friends, and I have sat in many courtrooms listening to the tribunes of the state try to silence him and his moral revolution in journalism.
Siege at Wounded Knee 50 years later: the fight for self-determination continues. (10th March 2023)
The 1973 Siege at Wounded Knee is the longest “civil unrest” in the history of the US Marshal Service. For 71 days, the American Indian Movement (AIM) and members of the Oglala Lakota (Sioux) nation were under siege in a violent standoff with the FBI and US Marshals equipped with high powered rifles and armored personnel carriers. Two people were killed, over two dozen wounded. At stake, sovereignty and self-determination guaranteed through treaty rights.
NHS hospitals told to share patient data with US ‘spy-tech’ firm. (16th March 2023)
Palantir, whose owner claimed the NHS ‘makes people sick’, will ‘collect and process confidential patient information’.
Child labor is back…with a vengeance! (17th March 2023)
Child labor is back. That’s because rich corporations and their political parasites want it back. What better way, they doubtless imagine, for penniless, unaccompanied migrant children to spend their time than performing dangerous tasks in slaughterhouses or moiling with toxic cleansers in factories? What else are these kids going to do with their time? Go to school? Not likely, if our oligarchs have it their way.
Food barons are making a killing from this crisis. (17th March 2023)
Food prices have rocketed. Supermarket shelves are empty. The number of people going hungry has ballooned. But the cost of living crisis has not hit everyone. The food barons – like their friends in the oil and gas industry – are making a killing.
US media’s Iraq War pushers 20 years on: where are they now? Rich and influential. (17th March 2023)
Recently, the Pentagon reportedly blocked efforts by the Biden White House to share information pertaining to Russian war crimes with the International Criminal Court (ICC), citing concerns about the precedent it would set for prosecuting Americans for war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the other fields of US military involvement. On the eve of the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, there was a cyclical irony to the whole story: the US was effectively admitting it had zero legal or moral authority to help prosecute Russian war crimes in Ukraine because it had, itself, committed many of the same crimes, up to and including the invasion of another country.
20 years ago, Canadian media lined up to call for war in Iraq. (17th March 2023)
Here’s a roundup of some Canadian columnists and editorial boards that supported the Iraq war in March 2003. Don’t let them forget it.
Iraq 20 years on: death came from the skies on March 19 2003 – and the killing continues to this day. (17th March 2023)
The mass killings of Iraqis started on the night of March 19 2003 with the US-led coalition’s ‘shock and awe’ bombing of Baghdad. They called it ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’.
How the US and UK tried to justify the invasion of Iraq. (19th March 2023)
On March 20, 2003, the United States led a coalition that launched a fully-fledged invasion of Iraq, closely supported by the United Kingdom. The case it had made for invading the Middle Eastern nation was built on three basic premises: that the regime of Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD); that it was developing more of them to the potential advantage of “terrorist” groups; and that creating a “friendly and democratic” Iraq would set an example for the region.
Iraq War 20 years on: Tony Blair should be in prison NOT Julian Assange. (19th March 2023) [Video.]
Bush-era Neocons should shut up about Iraq (and everything else). (20th March 2023)
David Frum and Max Boot, two neoconservatives who helped grease the wheels for the invasion of Iraq, have some thoughts they’d like to share with us as we approach the 20th anniversary (on Sunday) of that horrific and unforgivable war. Both of these perspectives can be read in widely esteemed mainstream publications, because everyone who was responsible for inflicting that war upon our species has enjoyed mainstream influence and esteem to this very day.
Label Israel what it is — an apartheid state. (20th March 2023)
The killing of the Palestinian people continues at full throttle. Not a day goes by without maiming, injuring, imprisoning, condemning schools, displacing families, and demolishing Palestinian homes. Yet, when somebody points to the similarities to pogroms, apartheid countries, Kristallnacht, and other examples of state terror, western leaders act incredulous and condemn the people who point to the similarities. They sidestep the actual crimes and terror committed and sanctioned by a powerful state and concentrate on those who stand with the Palestinians.
The next bomb to go off in the banking crisis will be derivatives. (20th March 2023)
If the U.S. Treasury Secretary and her staff at F-SOC were just yesterday getting around to finding out which U.S. banks had counterparty exposure to Credit Suisse’s derivatives, we are all in very big trouble. The serious problems at Credit Suisse have been making headlines for two years, including here at Wall Street On Parade.
The invasion of Iraq wasn’t a ‘mistake’. It was a crime. (20th March 2023)
Today is the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. We should never forget and never forgive the architects of that evil war.
‘Mexico is not a US colony!’: AMLO [López Obrador, President of Mexico] condemns invasion threats and honors the nationalization of oil and lithium. (21st March 2023) [Link to a video/podcast.]
The Iraq invasion 20 years later: it was indeed a big lie that launched the catastrophic war. (21st March 2023)
Bush and Cheney were not misled by flawed intelligence; they were promoting false information.
Monopoly capitalism – what it is and how do we fight it. A report produced by Global Justice Now. Included here, as a pdf download, for the statistics and up to date information. The way we truly deal with ‘Monopoly Capitalism’ can be found on other pages of this blog, such as The Great Marxist-Leninist Theoreticians.
For Palestinians, Israel’s ‘Fight to protect democracy’ is bitterly surreal. (22nd March 2023)
You simply cannot call a state ‘democratic’ that legalizes privileges for Jews and denies equality and right to self-determination for the other half of the population under its control – the Palestinians.
Criminals at large: the Iraq War twenty years on. (22nd March 2023)
Twenty years on, former US President George W. Bush, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Australia’s own John Howard, the troika most to blame for not just the criminal invasion of a foreign country but the regional and global cataclysm consequential to it, remain at large. Since then, Bush has taken to painting; Blair and Howard have preferred to sell gobbets of alleged wisdom on the lecture circuit.
Forever Wars vs. Armageddon (22nd March 2023)
While the world’s attention is focused on the U.S. proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, 900 U.S. troops continue to occupy Syria, as they have since 2017 , and 2,000 remain stationed in Iraq, 20 years after the U.S. attacked, overthrew its government, and hung its president. Around 500 have been in Somalia since Biden redeployed them in June 2022.
Not the Andrew Marr Show: Galloway proved right about Iraq. (22nd March 2023) [Video podcast which contains some interesting, historical clips.]
BP extracted Iraqi oil worth £15bn after British invasion. (22nd March 2023)
Despite UK ministers denying the war was about oil, the flagship British company reaped a bonanza upon its return to Iraq after the 2003 invasion.
Criminals at large: the Iraq War twenty years on. (22nd March 2023)
The arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for Russian President Vladimir Putin came at an opportune moment. It was, if nothing else, a feeble distraction over the misdeeds and crimes of other leaders current and former. Russia, not being an ICC member country, does not acknowledge that court’s jurisdiction. Nor, for that matter, does the United States, despite the evident chortling from US President Joe Biden.
Selling the Iraq War: a how-to guide. (23 March 2023)
The war on Iraq won’t be remembered for how it was waged so much as for how it was sold. It was a propaganda war, a war of perception management, where loaded phrases, such as ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and ‘rogue state’ were hurled like precision weapons at the target audience: us.
How Boris Johnson raked in £5m in 6 months after leaving office. (23rd March 2023)
The former prime minister has made over £25,000 a day in outside earnings since he left Downing Street.
G7 vs BRICS – off to the races. (23rd March 2023)
Last summer, the Group of 7 (G7), a self-anointed forum of nations that view themselves as the most influential economies in the world, gathered at Schloss Elmau, near Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, to hold their annual meeting. Their focus was punishing Russia through additional sanctions, further arming of Ukraine and the containment of China.
At the same time, China hosted, through video conference, a gathering of the BRICS economic forum. Comprised of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, this collection of nations relegated to the status of so-called developing economies focused on strengthening economic bonds, international economic development and how to address what they collectively deemed the counter-productive policies of the G7.
Noam Chomsky on propaganda, war, fascism, free speech and the future. (24th March 2023) [First broadcast in February 2023, but we have only just become aware of its existence. A video podcast.]
Joint statements of the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation. (24th March 2023)
Following extensive talks on March 21 between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin during the Chinese leader’s Moscow visit, the two heads of state signed two important joint statements that will guide their bilateral relations for the coming period.
For 20 years, Team Bush has escaped prosecution for their war crimes in Iraq. (24th March 2023)
20 years of Iraq denialism: The New York Times continues to get it wrong on U.S. Empire. (24th March 2023)
Marking the twentieth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, The New York Times ran a feature-length article titled, ‘20 Years On, a Question Lingers About Iraq: Why Did the U.S. Invade?’ The piece acknowledges some harsh realities about the war, while dodging questions about its legality and the imperial motivations that fueled it. This is par for the course for the paper of record, which has a decades-long history of sidestepping damning questions about the war.
Still spinning the Iraq War 20 years later. (24th March 2023)
‘Don’t worry, it’s a slam dunk’.
—CIA director George Tenet’s response to President Bush’s demand for intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction to provide to the American people, December 21, 2002.
America is in a disgraced class of its own. (28th March 2023)
The United States has a poverty problem.
[Or we could just change the system.]
Why would China be an enemy? (March 26th 2023)
I am completely at a loss as to why the UK should seek to join in with the US in considering China an enemy, and in looking to build up military forces in the Pacific to oppose China.
The U.S./EU/NATO axis of domination remains the greatest threat to international peace on our planet. (26th March 2023)
This commentary really should be part two from the piece I wrote last week in the run-up to the anti-war mobilization that took place March 18th which commemorated the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. In that article I made a similar argument about why the U.S. should be seen as the greatest threat to the survival of collective humanity on our planet.
Syrians have every right to attack US Occupiers. (26th March 2023)
The western world is solemnly commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion by blindly following the US into more conflict and militarism while repeating all the same kinds of mass media malpractice.
US continues its abuse of the EU with recent Inflation Reduction Act Agreement. (28th March 2023)
It was all rainbows and unicorns during a recent meeting between US President Joe Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen as they announced that EU-extracted and processed minerals will be covered by the Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) clean vehicle tax credits.
Honduras now recognizes Beijing, not US-backed separatists on Taiwan. (29th March 2023) (Podcast.)
With a background on official recognition of the People’s Republic of China.
US officials really want you to know. The US is the world’s ‘Leader’! (30th March 2023)
In response to questions he received during a press conference on Monday about Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin cementing a ‘new era’ in strategic partnership between China and Russia, the White House National Security Council’s John Kirby made no fewer than seven assertions that the US is the ‘leader’ of the world.
High stakes as Uncle Sam’s days of impunity are finally over. (30th March 2023)
Russia and China are determined to hold the American perpetrators of the Nord Stream sabotage to account. Uncle Sam’s days – indeed decades – of wanton criminality are over. There’s going to be hell to pay as the imperialist tyranny in Washington hits a wall of reality.
Australia isn’t a nation, it’s a US military base with kangaroos. (2nd April 2023)
One of the many, many signs that Australia is nothing more than a US military and intelligence asset is the way its government has consistently refused to intervene to protect Australian citizen Julian Assange from political persecution at the hands of the US empire.
The Cold War was never about democracy. (3rd April 2023)
After World War II, the Indonesian Communist Party threw itself into democratic politics and outreach to broad segments of society. Western intelligence agencies were worried because they knew that the PKI was not coercing people into giving them power — they were simply growing in popularity.
The simple reason why the U.S. wants ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ of the Earth. (3rd April 2023)
Imagine the uproar if China or Russia—or any other country for that matter—said it aimed to exercise military control over land, sea, air, and space to protect its interests and investments.
This amazingly has been the stated United States policy since 1997.
Profits of Doom: military contractors rob us daily. (5th April 2023)
Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, and other Pentagon contractors make outrageous levels of profits, due to a number of corrupt practices that riddle the military procurement practices, Congress, and the corporate benefactors. One hundred percent of their profits are paid for with the taxes removed from your pay, usually before you ever see it.
U.S. interference in the Middle East – 20 years since the U.S. invasion of Iraq – Colonel Larry Wilkerson. (6th April 2023)
It’s invaluable to hear from former insiders like Colonel Wilkerson, even if they sometimes unintentionally reveal biases and blind stops. And given how much harm the US has done, and how little our press admits to it, it’s important to look at our rap sheet, starting above all with the Middle East.
Should Leftists call for ending NATO? (6th April 2023)
Dark Mines: the harsh underbelly of electric vehicles. (6th April 2023)
EVs are hardly the only pieces of cutting edge technology that exploit workers in the global south. The other development that has dominated the business press is the development of generative AI.
Congress calls for Assange’s freedom! (6th April 2023). Podcast.
Why the US wants ‘full spectrum dominance’ of the Earth. (7th April 2023)
Imagine the uproar if China or Russia—or any other country for that matter—said it aimed to exercise military control over land, sea, air, and space to protect its interests and investments.
The West has been planning to crush China for a very long time. (7th April 2023)
Imperial spinmeisters like Gordon Chang are just lying when they frame China’s militarizing to defend itself against undisguised US encirclement as China militarizing to attack Americans.
The Grayzone Friday Live – Israel, Palestine and Saudi Arabia; British Muslim ‘fundamentalist’ Mehdi Hasan becomes champion of US Democrats. (7th April 2023) Podcast.
Corporate greed is a root cause of rail disasters around the world. (10th April 2023)
On February 25, Greece experienced its deadliest rail disaster ever when a freight train ran headlong into a passenger train coming towards it on the same track, killing 57 people. This tragic accident, near the city of Larissa, occurred just weeks after the East Palestine, Ohio rail disaster, and while the outcomes are different, the root cause is the same: corporate greed and deregulation.
John Pilger’s tips for seeing through propaganda. (10th April 2023)
Journalist John Pilger explains how to see through propaganda, especially the most dangerous of all, which is the propaganda that claims to be ‘objective reporting’.
Biden just begged Canada to do his dirty work in Haiti. (11 April 2023). Podcast which discusses yet another plan of the ‘western’ powers to engineer an invasion of Haiti. Introduces the strangely named ‘Global Fragility Act’. Actions remain the same but the language changes.
Time to dismantle Monroe Doctrine politics. (11th April 2023)
The Monroe Doctrine became the ideological basis for US hegemony in the region, justifying the violation of the rights of nations of self-determination, as was the case for Venezuela in 2002 and since then.
German vaccine maker BioNtech faces series of lawsuits for alleged covid-19 vaccine harms. (14th April 2023)
The experimental mRNA covid-19 vaccines that were developed and launched to market in record time, generating record profits for their manufacturers as well as injuries for untold thousands, will be put to the test before the German courts.
Season of the Snitch – The Grayzone Friday Live. A podcast which described where so-called ‘journalists’ in the US boasted about traking down someone who leaked information which showed the US (and other ‘allies’) were lying about the war in the Ukraine. None of these ‘journalists’, or any of their peers, ever really challenged the substance of the leak. This attitude was repeated a few days later (The Media Show, BBC Radio 4, 16.30 Wednesday 19th April 2023) by equally supine British journalists who work for the prime source of British Government propaganda in the UK, i.e., the BBC. However, the BBC radio programme muddied the waters by aligning and comparing the report about the Pentagon Papers leak and a cold paedophile case in the UK.
Waiting for the End of the World. (16th April 2023)
We cannot even begin to fathom the non-stop ripple effects deriving from the 2023 geopolitical earthquake that shook the world: Putin and Xi, in Moscow, de facto signaling the beginning of the end of Pax Americana.
China, Brazil lead in chipping away at U.S. economic power abroad. (16th April 2023)
The United States proclaimed the Monroe Doctrine 200 years ago and ever since has arranged Latin American and Caribbean affairs to its advantage. Nevertheless, struggles for national and regional independence did continue and the poor and marginalized classes did resist. Eventually there would be indigenous movements, labor mobilizations, and progressive and socialist-inclined governments. Cuba’s revolutionary government has endured for 63 years.
US moral authority is dead and buried. (16th April 2023)
Seven progressive Democrats from the House of Representatives have signed a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland calling for the Biden administration to drop the charges against Julian Assange and cease seeking his extradition.
Why did Madison write the Second Amendment? (17th April 2023)
The Second Amendment was intended in the first instance to protect slaveholders from the people they owned.
Research shows poverty is 4th leading cause of death in US. (19th April 2023)
Research published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association estimated that poverty was linked to at least 183,000 deaths in the United States in 2019 among people aged 15 or older, making inadequate income the nation’s fourth-leading mortality driver that year behind heart disease, cancer, and smoking.
Snowden and Texeira: ten years of disaster. (19th April2023)
Ten years ago Edward Snowden was helped to escape by Wikileaks and to publish his revelations by The Intercept, Guardian, New York Times and others.
In 2023 Jack Texeira is tracked down by UK secret service front Bellingcat in conjunction with the New York Times and in parallel with the Washington Post, not to help him escape or help him publish or tell people his motives, but to help the state arrest him.
UK spent public funds backing Venezuelan ‘president’ in gold dispute. (25th April 2023)
Britain put tens of thousands of pounds towards Juan Guaidó’s efforts to access $2bn worth of Venezuelan gold held in the Bank of England, new data reveals.
De-dollarization kicks into high gear. (27th April 2023)
The US dollar is essential to US global power projection. But in 2022, the dollar share of reserve currencies slid 10 times faster than the average in the past two decades.
The United States of Paralysis. (27th April 2023)
Political paralysis is snuffing out what is left of our anemic democracy.
John Pilger on the coming war. Speak up. Now. (1st May 2023)
The enormity of this violence and suffering seems to have no place in the western consciousness. ‘No one knows how many’ is the media refrain. Blair and George W. Bush — and Straw and Cheney and Powell and Rumsfeld et al — were never in danger of prosecution. Blair’s propaganda maestro, Alistair Campbell, is celebrated as a ‘media personality’.
In the Coronation, Britain’s ruling class will cast its dark spell on millions. (2nd May 2023)
Ambivalence is not enough. We can’t just ignore the monarchy. We need to oppose it, overthrow it, and replace it with rituals that really would help us build a better society.
The enemy from within. (2nd may 2023)
America is a stratocracy, a form of government dominated by the military. It is axiomatic among the two ruling parties that there must be a constant preparation for war. The war machine’s massive budgets are sacrosanct. Its billions of dollars in waste and fraud are ignored. Its military fiascos in Southeast Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East have disappeared into the vast cavern of historical amnesia.
Selling out Julian Assange. (2nd My 2023)
The Australian government is finally responding to growing public protests to get Julian Assange freed from his British torture dungeon.
Foiled escape: UC Global, the CIA and Julian Assange. (3rd May 2023)
However described, the shabby treatment of Julian Assange never ceases to startle. While he continues to suffer in Belmarsh prison awaiting the torments of an interminable legal process, more material is coming out showing the way he was spied upon while staying at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Julian Assange’s letter to King Charles III. (6th May 2023)
On the coronation of my liege, I thought it only fitting to extend a heartfelt invitation to you to commemorate this momentous occasion by visiting your very own kingdom within a kingdom: His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh.
After 75 Years, What Future for Palestine-Israel? (9th May 2023)
Are best years of my country behind me?
Reflections on a long-ago tour of Los Alamos and the Trinity Atomic Test Site. (10th May 2023)
‘The Forever Prisoner’: Abu Zubaydah’s drawings expose the depraved US torture policy. (12th May 2023)
For 21 years, the Guantanamo detainee Abu Zubaydah has been in US custody without charge, tortured and sexually humiliated, with no prospect for release.
How Britain built a second empire under the cover of ‘aid’. (10th May 2023)
The UK government has long presented its aid budget as a beneficent gift to the world’s poor. The truth is it developed out of Britain’s scramble to maintain and expand its corporate interests as its formal empire crumbled.
David Lammy: Washington’s man in Labour. (12th May 2023)
The likely future foreign secretary has been attending elite gatherings in the US while courting MI6 and displaying his establishment credentials on Labour’s foreign and military policy, which is likely to be near-identical to the current government.
Khader Adnan’s last hunger strike. (18th May 2023)
EU adopts ‘pragmatic approach’ to sharing its citizens’ most precious data with US Department of Homeland Security. (19th May 2023)
The EU’s own top court has ruled on multiple occasions that the USA does not offer adequate privacy protections for non-citizens, yet the Commission and the member states are planning to open up their biometric databases to the [DHS].
Kissinger’s bloody paper trail in Chile. (21st May 2023)
Total indirect death toll in the U.S. ‘War on Terror’ is 4.5 million. (22nd May 2023)
Now, in mid-May, this project has also released its estimates of the indirect deaths caused in the War on Terror. These indirectly caused deaths have been estimated at 3.6 to 3.7 million. If these are added to the direct deaths caused earlier, the total number of deaths in the War on Terror goes up to 4.5 million to 4.6 million. So the total number of deaths is about 5 times the number of direct deaths.
America’s wars and the US debt crisis. (22nd May 2023)
To surmount the debt crisis, America needs to stop feeding the Military-Industrial Complex, the most powerful lobby in Washington.
Spycops: When the public is the enemy. (23rd May 2023)
The start of the Undercover Policing Inquiry provides startling details of how the Metropolitan Police and MI5 spied for decades on political parties and peace organisations.
After clearing MI5 of torture, Keir Starmer attended its chief’s leaving party. (25th May 2023)
The year after Starmer protected Sir Jonathan Evans from possible prosecution over MI5’s role in CIA torture, the then senior public prosecutor went to the spymaster’s farewell drinks, paid for by MI5.
Henry Kissinger Is a disgusting war criminal. And the rot goes deeper than him. (27th May 2023)
It’s Henry Kissinger’s 100th birthday today. The fact that this monster is celebrated instead of in jail tells you that he’s part of a much bigger problem — and that problem is America’s global empire.
The peasants are seizing the Commons (again). (30th May 2023)
Weaponising anti-semitism, bringing down Corbyn. (30th May 2023)
Britain’s mainstream media, its Army and the Israel lobby all combined to ensure Jeremy Corbyn did not become prime minister, a new book argues.
The truth about Israel exposed – the banned video Israel doesn’t’ want you to see.(31st May 2023)
The never ending Nabka.
Business over apartheid: when Thatcher met Mandela – or When Mandela (and the ANC) sold out their people. (31st May 2023)
As soon as Nelson Mandela was released from prison after 27 years, and with apartheid still in place, UK officials were lobbying him for their business interests in South Africa, declassified files show.
Israeli forces’ systemic denial of fair trial rights to Palestinian child prisoners amounts to arbitrary detention. (1st June 2023)
Israeli authorities’ systematic denial of fair trial rights to Palestinian children detained by Israeli forces from the occupied West Bank and prosecuted in Israeli military courts constitutes arbitrary detention, Defense for Children International – Palestine said in a report released today.
EU’s covid-19 vaccine procurement scandal continues to grow despite deafening media silence. (2nd June 2023)
“Under Commission President von der Leyen, the tendency of EU institutions (and officials) to evade their due accountability by collectively hiding behind a democracy-defying bulwark of opacity has reached alarming proportions.”
The Second Amendment of the Constitution does not justify the ‘right to bear arms’. (2nd June 2023)
The historical distortions around the Second Amendment:
The Second (2nd) Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is often cited by the National Rifle Association (NRA), right wingers, and members of the Republican Party to justify rejecting most if not all gun regulations. They argue that the 2nd Amendment means that Americans are and should be ‘free’ to carry arms. They say it gives Americans the right to bear arms to resist the ‘tyranny of governments’.
WHO forges partnership with EU to create Global Digital Vaccine Passport System. (6th June 2023)
The World Health Organization (WHO) adopts the EU’s expiring digital vaccine passport as a global standard, as we warned would happen over a year ago.
Ten years later, Snowden’s heroism shines ever brighter (8th June 2023)
Ten years ago this week, Edward Snowden began shocking the world with his revelations of federal surveillance crime sprees. Unfortunately, many of the media outlets that used his disclosures of confidential information have long since shunned him or joined the shameless stampede calling for his prosecution.
Snowden warns today’s surveillance technology makes 2013 look like ‘child’s play’. (9th June 2023)
The continued erosion of privacy due to better snooping continues apace. What is particularly depressing is the way consumers eager aid the surveillance state by, for instance, installing Ring cameras, whose output Amazon can share with police without owner consent, or using biometric IDs on phones.
Labour’s love affair with private healthcare (19th June 2023)
From the embrace of private hospitals to shady donations from private health interests, there is little to suggest that today’s Labour leadership intends to defend Aneurin Bevan’s vision of a truly public NHS.
‘No strategic value to us’: When the UK planned to give the Falklands to Argentina. (21st June 2023)
Fourteen years before the Falklands war, British ministers planned to transfer sovereignty of the islands to Argentina, privately arguing the territory could become costly, could not be defended and was a source of military tension with Buenos Aires.
A New Third World Debt Crisis? The need for system change.(24th June 2023)
Emerging economies fall into debt crises usually for one of two reasons. The first is borrowing in foreign currencies, often to obtain lower interest rates or bigger loan amounts, only to see the debt cost rise greatly as the value of the domestic currency falls against the borrowing currency.
The EU sows the seeds of its own destruction. (25th June 2023)
Working class Europeans are increasingly facing declining living standards and are turning against the EU. The war in Ukraine and the energy crisis has exacerbated this trend, and national governments and the European Commission are only making matters worse.
An EU double standard with massive impact on the global environment. (26th June 2023)
A report that for the first time reveals the full scale of the European Union export trade in bee killing pesticides. The report sheds light on the double standard that’s been at play as the EU continues to export huge quantities of this pesticide despite having banned the use of these chemicals in their own fields.
IMF confirms that profits are driving inflation. (27th June 2023)
The idea of “greedflation,” that profits are playing a significant role in our current inflation, has been treated as controversial among economists. Some experts have even treated it as crankdom. Yet overwhelmingly, businesses have not accepted reduction in their returns to preserve market share. This is a big departure from past bouts of marked inflation, where companies did accept lower profits when inflation was high.
CPS has destroyed all records of Keir Starmer’s four trips to Washington. (29th June 2023)
US records show Starmer met with Attorney General Eric Holder and a host of American and British national security officials in Washington in 2011, when he was in charge of Julian Assange’s proposed extradition to Sweden.
The struggle against Assange’s extradition continues. (30th June 2023)
As Julian Assange’s appeal of his extradition to the United States wends its way through British courts, now is a good time to review what’s at stake. Nothing less than a free press and the rule of law. That’s because Assange is being persecuted for publishing proof of U.S. military criminality, among other war and political matters.
France’s Left has finally woken up to racist plice violence. (1st July 2023)
France’s left has often failed to speak up for marginalized minorities. But after the backlash over the police murder of 17-year-old Nahel, left-wing parties have taken a clear stance, refusing to condemn rioters and insisting their anger is justified.
As Israel smashes up Jenin, its British apologists are enabling this violence. (5th July 2023)
“The scenes in Jenin have been terrifying. There is live fire in every direction, and homes are being demolished. The sound of screams are hard to forget. They keep being replayed in my head. The biggest shock was when the Israeli forces came out of the jeeps and started firing bullets at us and our cameras when they saw us.”
Weaponised antisemitism crushed the political left. Now it’s the cultural left’s turn. (5th July 2023)
We have reached the seemingly absurd point that a political leader famed for his anti-racism, a rock star whose most celebrated work focuses on the dangers of racism and fascism, and a renowned film maker committed to socially progressive causes are all now characterised as antisemites.
When America was great, savage white un-settlers raped a continent and assaulted a planet. (5th July 2023 – first published on October 28th 2018)
Your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings…are…a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
In Jenin, Israel is unveiling the next phase of Apartheid (6th July 2023)
Palestinians in West Bank cities are fast discovering that if their expulsion won’t be possible, Gazafication will be their future.
Journalists abandoned Julian Assange and slit their own throats. (13th July 2023)
The failure by journalists to mount a campaign to free Julian Assange, or expose the vicious smear campaign against him, is one more catastrophic and self-defeating blunder by the news media.
The destruction of this Palestinian community was greenlit by Israel’s Supreme Court. (13th July 2023)
The stories of the Palestinians struggling against Israel’s decades-long attempts to expel over 1,000 people from their homes in the Masafer Yatta region of the West Bank — the largest expulsion in the occupied territories since 1967.
A transatlantic trend: banks in the UK and US are closing customer accounts with little to no warning or explanation. (14th July 2023)
“The escalation team just reached out to me. They told me that the account was being shut down, and they wouldn’t give me a reason. I asked them if they would ever give me a reason. They said no.”
Israel killed civilians, targeted hospitals in Jenin with US weapons and support. (15th July 2023)
Israel could not mount its military operations against Palestinians without $3.8 billion in annual U.S. military aid.
Colonialism or sovereignty? How the global financial system traps countries in debt. (15th July 2023)
Radhika Desai, Michael Hudson, and Ann Pettifor continue their discussion of the third world debt crisis, its similarities to and difference from the 1980s debt crisis, and how they are the manifestations of a system that (whether intended to or not) operates to subject often poor borrower nations to the authority of the first world.
Jenin is just the start: Did Palestinians finally bury the ghosts of the past? (14th July 2023)
For the older generation, time has stood still. But it has not. The new Palestinian generation has buried the ghosts of the past and moved on. And now, they are ready to speak for themselves and to fight for themselves. Jenin is just the start.
Israel does not have a right to self-defense for its occupation. (15th July 2023)
Israel’s “right to defend itself” is invoked constantly by its supporters, but international law says Israel cannot simultaneously occupy Palestinian land and attack it as a “foreign” threat, or treat those resisting as enemy combatants.
European Parliament approves vicious anti-Cuba resolution. (19th July 2023)
Signs were evident. Touring Spain in May, the Cuban musical duo Buena Fe (Good Faith) had their concerts disrupted by thugs; some were canceled. A month later in Paris, protests orchestrated by a Cuban émigré university professor forced a prestigious poetry festival to withdraw the honorary presidency it was going to award Cuban poet Nancy Morejón.
Palestinian resistance will not be snuffed out by Israel. (19th July 2023)
The Israeli incursion into Jenin showed the violence of occupation and blatant disregard for Palestinian rights. At least 133 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since the start of this year alone.
Across the West, people are dying in greater numbers. Nobody wants to learn why. (20th July 2023)
There’s only one plausible explanation for continuing silence on excess deaths: governments, media and regulators are frightened of what the research may uncover.
70 years later, the Korean War must end. (28th July 2923)
July 27 marked 70 years since the signing of the armistice that halted — but did not end — the Korean War. Since then, the divided Peninsula has been locked in a perpetual state of war that grows ever more dangerous.
Iran 1953: MI6 plots with Islamists to overthrow democracy. (1st August 2023)
Declassified British files highlight a little known aspect of the joint MI6/CIA coup against Iran’s democratically elected government in August 1953 – UK covert action in support of leading radical Shia Islamists, the predecessors of Ayatollah Khomeini.
Fascism is the western answer to class struggle. (4th August 2023)
The US has the largest military budget in the world by a factor of ten. But it is nevertheless apparently incapable of producing usable weapons and bullets. The US spends multiples of what the rest of the rich world does per person on healthcare while it has active genocide levels of people dying who wouldn’t be in a functioning society. The end of the agreement between capital and the state to forego predatory pricing (‘greedflation’) on food and other necessities is increasing food insecurity for vast swaths of the West. And nuclear war with Russia is once again an implied possibility.
Bobby and the Lobby (4th August 2023)
The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate discuss Robert F. Kennedy Jr. backing out of an Israel-Palestine dialogue he’d agreed to with Blumenthal, and his deepening involvement with some of the Israel lobby’s most extreme figures. (Video podcast).
Kiwirok: when the sky rained metallic death. (8th August 2023)
Violence from the military remained a constant threat. In one particularly harrowing incident, soldiers happened across Benny’s family in the jungle. The soldiers ripped Benny’s two year old cousin from his aunty’s arms and threw her to the ground with so much force that the child’s back was broken. They then raped his aunty, forcing Benny to watch. His small cousin died two weeks after the attack; his aunty sometime later from her own injuries.
Revisiting the bombing of Nagasaki, 78 years later. (9th August 2023)
The United States’ decision to drop nuclear bombs on Japan was not without precedent. In the winter of 1945, the United States firebombed both Dresden, Germany, killing forty-five thousand people, and Tokyo, Japan, killing more than three hundred thousand people. Some believe these estimates to be low.
An exceptional military for the exceptional nation. (12th August 2023)
In his message to the troops prior to the July 4th weekend, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin offered high praise indeed. “We have the greatest fighting force in human history,” he tweeted, connecting that claim to the U.S. having patriots of all colors, creeds, and backgrounds “who bravely volunteer to defend our country and our values.”
Environmentalists owe an enormous debt to Julian Assange. (23rd August 2023)
Environmentalists throughout the world owe an enormous debt of gratitude to political prisoner Julian Assange, the founder and publisher of Wikileaks — and most of them don’t know it.
Disaster capitalists are circling Maui like buzzards. (24th August 2023)
Before the embers were even cold in Lāhainā, Maui, survivors of the wildfires started reporting cold calls from land speculators hoping to scoop up Hawaiian properties at bargain prices — proving once again that capitalists never let a good crisis go to waste.
Biden greeted with extremely HOSTILE response in Maui. (24th August 2023) – podcast
Henry A. Kissinger at 100, still a war criminal. (25th August 2023)
If nothing else, Kissinger’s approach to international politics has been consistent for more than half a century. Only actions advancing the military and imperial might of the United States were to be pursued. To be avoided were those actions that might diminish its power in any way or — in the Cold War era — enhance the power of its great adversary, the Soviet Union. Under such a rubric, any indigenous current favoring independence — whether political or economic — or seeking more democratic governance elsewhere on Earth came to represent a threat to this country. Such movements and their adherents were to be eradicated — covertly, if possible; overtly, if necessary.
Maui residents ERUPT IN RAGE. (29th August 2023) – podcast.
Loosening child labor regulations result in deaths of teen workers. (31st August 2023)
Child labor laws are being repealed in the United States in order to preserve profits, loosening previous restrictions in order to allow younger minors to work in dangerous settings. In a span of only five weeks this summer, three teens have died in industrial workplace accidents
His choice: Wasteful military spending or investing more in the British public? (1st September 2023)
While the government fails to devote adequate resources to the health and welfare of its citizens, it is squandering vast sums of money on unnecessary weapons systems. Will new defence secretary Grant Shapps continue to throw good money after bad?
‘Our major interest is copper’: Britain backed Pinochet’s bloody coup in Chile. (4th September 2023)
When the Chilean military overthrew Salvador Allende’s democratically elected government in September 1973, UK officials supported and worked with the new junta as it indulged in widespread atrocities, declassified files show.
Britain secretly helped Chile’s military intelligence after Pinochet coup. (5th September 2023)
As the Pinochet regime rounded up and murdered its political opponents after the 1973 coup, a UK Foreign Office propaganda unit passed material to Chile’s military intelligence and MI6 connived with a key orchestrator of the coup, newly declassified files show.
22 years of drone warfare and no end in sight. (6th September 2023)
“I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray.”
Chile’s coup at 50: countdown toward a coup (11th September 2023)
“In the Eisenhower period, we would be heroes,” Henry Kissinger told President Richard Nixon several days after the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, lamenting that they would not receive credit in the press for this Cold War accomplishment.
50 years after Chile’s coup, Salvador Allende’s grandson speaks about Britain’s role in the rise of Pinochet. (11th September 2023)
In Santiago, Declassified spoke with Pablo Sepúlveda Allende about Margaret Thatcher’s friendship with Chile’s dictator and how Labour helped him evade justice for crimes against humanity.
How the American invasion unleashed Jihad. (12th September 2023)
Journalist Anand Gopal on Islamism, ISIS, and the role of the United States in Iraqi politics today.
Chile: The secrets the US Government continues to hide. (17th September 2023)
Fifty years after the military coup that brought down Salvador Allende and installed the Pinochet dicatorship, there are still top secret documents on the US role that must be declassified.
Over Assange, Britain’s press prefers to serve power not media freedom. (18th September 2023)
We might have expected British journalists to have turned the Julian Assange case into a cause celebre for press freedom and free speech. Not at all. Most of the mainstream media are silent or hostile, and are acting as instruments of the state.
Biden is the latest President to tout the Vietnam War as proud history. (20th September 2023)
When Joe Biden flew out of Hanoi last week, he was leaving a country where U.S. warfare caused roughly 3.8 million Vietnamese deaths. But, like every other president since the Vietnam War, he gave no sign of remorse. In fact, Biden led up to his visit by presiding over a White House ceremony that glorified the war as a noble effort.
‘Phantom Parrot’ – The secret state’s tool for mass intelligence gathering. (20th September 2023)
The British police can obtain the mobile phone passwords of members of the travelling public in order to download their data, in a programme linked to spy agency GCHQ, a new film shows.
Arundhati Roy: the dismantling of democracy in India will affect the whole world. (21st September 2023)
The text of the writer’s speech as she received the 45th European Essay Prize on September 12…’What’s happening in India is not that loose variety of internet fascism. It’s the real thing. We have become Nazis’,
Back to business as usual: the US is once again vigorously stirring the pot in its own ‘backyard’. (26th September 2023)
From Peru to Uruguay, to Ecuador and Guyana, the US is seeking to rebuild its strategic influence in Latin America, one gun at a time.
US surveillance firm’s charm offensive to UK Councils and Police Forces. (26th September 2023)
A US tech firm has been privately lobbying UK councils and police forces to scale up their surveillance using an AI-powered platform used against Black Lives Matter protesters in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
Zambia: front line of the US crusade against China in Africa. (26th September 2023 – originally published February but relevent to what is happening now.) – podcast.
The West’s hypocrisy towards Gaza’s breakout is stomach-turning.(8th October 2023)
This is the first time Palestinians, caged in the coastal enclave, have managed to inflict a significant strike against Israel vaguely comparable to the savagery Palestinians in Gaza have faced repeatedly since they were entombed in a cage more than 15 years ago, when Israel began its blockade by land, sea and air in 2007.
They’re repeating the word ‘unprovoked’ again, this time in defense of Israel. (8th October 2023)
We’re seeing the western political/media class bleating the word “unprovoked” in unison again, this time in reference to the massive multi-pronged operation launched by Hamas against Israel on Saturday morning.
Who remembers Cheddi Jagan? Britain’s forgotten coup in South America. (10th October 2023)
In October 1953 the UK overthrew a democratically-elected government in British Guiana. UK officials knew deposed leader Cheddi Jagan was benefiting the impoverished local population but acted to protect its business interests.
Abandoning the poor. (12th October 2023)
In New York, where land is a finite resource and real estate determines so much, it is a cruel irony that the richest people in the world are using their capital to literally reach ever higher into the clouds, while back on earth, the average New Yorker, grimly ensconced in reality, lives paycheck to paycheck, navigating a constant storm of food, healthcare, housing, transportation and utility costs.
James Cleverly spent £420,000 in public money on luxury jet travel. (24th October 2023)
The UK Foreign Office chartered a jet used by billionaires and pop stars (at a cost to the public of more than £420,000) to take Cleverly and 18 members of his staff to Latin America and the Caribbean in May.
The only US military intervention Britain (somewhat) opposed. (25th October 2023)
Margaret Thatcher’s government sought to prevent the US invasion of Grenada in October 1983, but once it went ahead, Whitehall refused to condemn it and sought its ‘swift success’ – even though it knew it violated international law, declassified files show.
Big Brother unchained: UK Government to abolish biometrics and surveillance safeguards as it embraces facial recognition. (31st October 2023)
“The lack of attention being paid to [public safeguards] at such a crucial time is shocking, and destruction of the surveillance camera code that we’ve all been using successfully for over a decade is tantamount to vandalism.”
Know your enemy. (30th October 2023)
The vast mass of the ignorant have been made so by scientific propaganda, and they have lost their capacity for independent thought. They were powerless to prevent the creation of their opinion, and they are sure their views about America are their own, individually arrived at. That makes them hard to modify.
When Britain armed Iraq’s genocidal war on the Kurds. (31st October 2023)
Conservative and Labour governments supported Baghdad’s brutal attack on the Kurds 60 years ago, knowing it may have constituted genocide, declassified files show.
Armistice Day and the Empire: a A name change and the catastrophe that followed. (November 10th 2023)
In 1954, the US Congress renamed Armistice Day to Veterans Day. The stated reason was to remember all generations of US veterans, not just veterans from the First World War. Congress advanced this rationale on the disingenuous notion that Armistice Day’s purpose was a celebration of veterans. It was not. Armistice Day’s purpose was to serve as a reminder of the horrors of the First World War and carry forward the declaration of those veterans of Never Again.
The Pentagon proclaims failure in its War on Terror in Africa. (16th November 2023)
America’s Global War on Terror has seen its share of stalemates, disasters, and outright defeats. During 20-plus years of armed interventions, the United States has watched its efforts implode in spectacular fashion, from Iraq in 2014 to Afghanistan in 2021. The greatest failure of its ‘Forever Wars’, however, may not be in the Middle East, but in Africa.
U.S.-China extinction-level event narrowly averted. (17th November 2023)
We humans came within ten feet of extinction on October 24. That’s when World War III almost erupted due to a near collision between American and Chinese warplanes over the South China Sea. U.S. corporate media was quick to blame Beijing for the Chinese pilot’s ‘dangerous maneuvers’, but such accusations beg the question: What in God’s name were American fighter jets doing there, near Chinese airspace, eight thousand miles from U.S. borders in the first place?
Canada’s top 0.01% saw income growth of 30% in 2021. (20th November 2023)
The distribution of income in this country is the result of policy choices we can fight to change.
European Parliament votes in favor of changes to the EU treaties. (22nd November 2023)
The Parliament voted on the report from the Committee on Constitutional Affairs (AFCO) of the European Parliament recommending changes to the EU treaties. The document envisages, among other matters, the transfer of more member states’ competencies to the EU level, which would, in fact, further reduce their sovereignty.
Quelle surprise! UK Government hands management of NHS patient data to CIA-linked US spyware firm, Palantir. (24th November 2023)
The company that aspires to be inside ‘every missile,… every drone’, including, it seems, those belonging to the Israeli Defence Forces, is now running the patient data platform of the world’s second largest public health care system.
The United Eunuchs of Europe. (26th November 2023)
A ‘geopolitical EU’ remains little more than a consolatory fantasy predicated on its power of attraction — the queue to join.
The end of US nuclear superiority – Scott Ritter. (28th November 2023)
As Russia modernizes its nuclear arsenal it is no longer interested in trying to patch up an arms control relationship with the U.S. based on the legacy of the Cold War.
Henry Kissinger: The Declassified Obituary – The primary sources on Kissinger’s controversial legacy. (30th November 2023)
The historical record documents the darker side of Kissinger’s controversial tenure in power: his role in the overthrow of democracy and the rise of dictatorship in Chile; disdain for human rights; support for dirty, and even genocidal, wars abroad.
ExxonMobil and a possible war in South America. (4th December 2023)
On December 3, 2023, a large number of registered voters in Venezuela voted in a referendum over the Essequibo region that is disputed with neighboring Guyana. Nearly all those who voted answered yes to the five questions. These questions asked the Venezuelan people to affirm the sovereignty of their country over Essequibo. “Today,” said Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, “there are no winners or losers.” The only winner, he said, is Venezuela’s sovereignty. The principal loser, Maduro said, is ExxonMobil.
Kissinger: ‘The world’s most dangerous man’. (4th December 2023)
The obituaries for Kissinger in the Washington Post and the New York Times paint a dramatic picture of a dangerous man, an amoral man, who was unscrupulous in his handling of the foreign and national security policies of the United States. These obituaries document the deceit and duplicity of the only man to serve simultaneously as secretary of state and national security adviser.
Pfizer and BioNTech are suing Poland over its refusal to pay for more covid-19 vaccines. Are they also suing Hungary? (5th December 2023)
Even by the normal standards of investor-state dispute settlements (ISDS), Pfizer and BioNtech’s lawsuit against the government of Poland for refusing to pay for more unwanted vaccines is especially egregious.
Richard Falk on Kissinger’s foreign policy. (5th December 2023)
Hitchens listed six major crimes carried out by Kissinger: 1) The deliberate mass killing of the civilian population in Indochina. 2) Deliberate collusion in mass murder, and later in assassination in Bangladesh. 3) The personal suborning and planning of murder, of a senior constitutional officer in a democratic nation—Chile—with which the United States was not at war. 4) Personal involvement in a plan to murder the head of state in the democratic nation of Cyprus. 5) The incitement and enabling of genocide in East Timor. 6) Personal involvement in a plan to kidnap and murder a journalist living in Washington, DC.
Kenya at 60: the shameful truth about British colonial abuse and how it was covered up. (8th December 2023)
It is fairly well known that the lives of hundreds of thousands of Kenyans were affected by terrible acts of violence under the British colonial administration. Less-known is how much the British imperialist government tried to cover up these violations.
The Napoléon that Ridley Scott and Hollywood won’t let you see. (11th December 2023)
As with every other Napoléon movie, Scott’s version will leave viewers with no understanding of the genocidal war to restore slavery that Bonaparte waged against Black revolutionaries in the French colony of Saint-Domingue – what’s known as Haiti today.
From Wounded Knee to Dakota Access Pipeline, Standing Rock still stands. (29th December 2023)
On December 29, 1890, over 250 Lakota men, women, and children were executed in what is known today as the Wounded Knee Massacre. Under pretenses of relocation, 500 soldiers of the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the United States Army, stoked by recent tension after the assassination of Sitting Bull and growing anti-Indian sentiment, opened fire on unarmed civilians with four Hotchkiss cannons and repeating rifles for several hours. The soldiers proceeded to go dwelling to dwelling, executing anyone upon discovery. Fleeing civilians were pursued and shot, some bodies found as far as three miles from the camp. In all, only four men and 47 women and children were left alive to be relocated.
View of the world – up to end of 2022
Ukraine – what you weren’t told – 2022
