Irish MEP calls out her own country on 'neutrality'

 

 

Clare Daly is a member of the EU parliament representing Ireland. 

She sounded out about Irish hypocrisy when it comes to declaring 'neutrality' but then joining the west in support of the US-UK-NATO war on Russia - using Ukraine as the hammer.  

To Decolonize Our Minds, Start With Words

 

 

Where is the clear image of a decolonized society we are to emulate? There isn’t one. Yet if we are to free ourselves, we need practical steps.

 

by Steven Newcomb (Peace & Planet News)

At least since historian Oswald Spengler published his prophetic The Decline of the West (1918), Western “civilization” has been portrayed as in a severe state of crisis and decline. For more than two centuries, the imperial enterprise of the United States has colonized the territories and resources of the original nations of this continent while pretending to have a “providentially assigned” or “God-given” destiny. This is the evidence of white Christian nationalism in U.S. law, based on the Bible and Christianity. Christendom was supposedly mandated to consume and eliminate heathendom.

As a Shawnee-Lenape writer, I prefer to think about such matters from an Original Nations’ perspective. Our Native ancestors were standing at the ocean shoreline, centuries ago, looking out at the first invading ships from Christendom coming toward them. Now imagine us as present-day Native people standing next to them with 500 years of hindsight.

This is a technique to begin decolonizing our minds. One step of that process involves taking a closer look at the way the English language colonizes our thinking. What is colonization? What is civilization?

Liberation is a word that appears to speak about something positive yet provides no clear image of the kind of society that will replace institutionalized oppression. 

In his book Civilization: The West and the Rest (2011), Naill Ferguson referred to that context as the West’s “ascendancy,” a term Webster’s defines as domination. Samuel Morison, in his Oxford History of the American People (1962), defined colonization as “a form of conquest in which a nation takes over a distant territory, thrusts in its own people, and controls or eliminates the native inhabitants.” Morison said that “modern colonization” has resulted in “world dominion.” Again, the theme of domination. The massive wealth accumulated by Western civilization is the result of patterns of genocide, expropriation of resources, and colonization, all maintained under the rubric of “globalization” and the “global economy.”

These days it is common to find discussions of decolonization. Cambridge University, for example, recently announced that it will work to decolonize its English literature curriculum. The theme of decolonization gained global attention during the activism against the Dakota Access pipeline in the Great Sioux Nation treaty lands and the Tar Sands in the far northern region of Great Turtle Island, to name just two examples.

It makes sense, in principle, that decolonization can be achieved by reversing patterns of domination. Yet where is the clear image of a decolonized society we are to emulate? There isn’t one. Yet if we are to free ourselves, we need practical steps.

When we talk about decolonization we are making an effort to think and articulate the results of colonization we want to dismantle without saying what should replace a colonized existence. Liberation is a word that appears to speak about something positive yet provides no clear image of the kind of society that will replace institutionalized oppression.

 

Here’s one possibility: providing a territorial sanctuary for Original Nations to enable them to build models of ecological, cultural, and spiritual sustainability free from the imposition of U.S. domination.

The Western mindset continues to be a primary source of domination, and a little-noticed paradox makes replacing a colonized mentality easier said than done: The English language I am using to write this article has been designed to reinforce and maintain the domination I want to end. We cannot end colonizing patterns by continuing to think and act in ways that maintain those patterns.

The languages of Original Indigenous Nations are repositories of vitally important cultural and spiritual models based on an attitude of deep reverence and respect for Mother Earth—for water, and for the ecosystems of the planet. Yet we all live under the “plenary power” of the United States. The verb “civilization” is defined by Webster’s as “the forcing of a cultural pattern on a population to which it is foreign.”

We ought to translate traditional cultural and spiritual concepts from our Original Nation languages into English. Those meanings and teachings contain thousands of years of ancestral, cultural, and spiritual imagery that the Western mindset does not naturally contain. My Oglala friend and mentor Birgil Kills once told me, for example, that an Oglala Lakota metaphor for marriage is the two wings of a bird. When they move together in unison the bird is able to fly beautifully. Other examples include “Mother Earth,” “the love of the land,” “All Our Relations,” “the land takes care of us when we take care of the land.” Some of the Seven Laws of the Oceti Sakowin as, Wacante Oganake, “to help, to share, to give, to be generous,” Wowaunsila, “pity, compassion,” and Wowauonihan, “to respect, to honor.”

Admittedly, such simple ideas can’t amount to much when the traditional territory of every Original Nation and the land of every Indian reservation on Great Turtle Island is legally and politically defined as “U.S. soil” and controlled by the United States based on the Doctrine of Christian Discovery and Domination.

All this civilization and dominion have brought Mother Earth to a period that scientists are calling the Sixth Extinction, the brink of ecological collapse. What kinds of negative impacts are going to result from radiation being released daily from the devastated nuclear reactors in Fukushima, Japan? The acidification of the oceans continues unabated. The massive decline of the global insect population is a powerful indicator that the planet is not right. Western systems make it fairly impossible for us to build economic models premised on reverence and an abiding respect for all life.

Clearly, we must not stay within the mental and behavioral limits of the system we say we want to replace.

~ Steven Newcomb (Shawnee, Lenape) is a legal scholar and one of the world’s foremost authorities on the doctrine of Christian discovery. In 2008 Fulcrum published his book Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery.  

The great illusion - a prayer for thanksgiving

 

Chiricahua Apache Prisoners of War at Ft. Marion in St. Augustine, Florida

Thanksgiving,

one of America's

greatest illusions,

the original sin

 

Dress up the genocide

real nice,

turkey, feathers,

pumpkin pie,

peace pipe,

native people

and the killer

christian colonists

seemingly

as friends.

 

But the truth

was otherwise.

 

The new,

soon to be empire,

rivaling Europe,

envisioned itself as

king of the global hill.

 

Washington 

had to sell

its image

as something

great and different,

from all the other

marauders

and plunderers.

 

But eventually

the turkeys come home

to roost

and the world learns

that the noble sounding

American experiment

is just a nightmare

 

Give a prayer 

of thanks today

that the veil

has been lifted

and that all 

can now see the truth,

if willing 

to open their eyes

and hearts.

 

The shining city on the hill,

streets paved in gold,

is nothing more

than a sad

illusion.

 

Just a

figment

in the pirates

imagination.

 

Bruce  

Who really writes the movie scripts?

 

 

If you've seen Top Gun or Transformers, you may have wondered: Does all of that military machinery on screen come with strings attached? Does the military actually get a crack at the script? 

With the release of a vast new trove of internal government documents, the answers have come into sharp focus: the US military has exercised editorial control over thousands of films and television programs. 

Propelled into a field trip across America, media professor Roger Stahl engages an array of other researchers, bewildered veterans, PR insiders, and industry producers willing to talk. In unsettling detail, he discovers how the military and CIA have pushed official narratives while systematically scrubbing scripts of war crimes, corruption, racism, sexual assault, coups, assassinations, and torture. 

From The Longest Day to Lone Survivor, Iron Man to Iron Chef, and James Bond to Jack Ryan, the deliberate creation of this other "cinematic universe" is one of the great PR coups of our time. As these activities gain new public scrutiny, new questions arise: How have they managed to fly under the radar for so long? And where do we go from here?  

Distributed by the Media Education Foundation mediaed.org

“This powerful documentary hits us with overwhelming evidence that every film made with DOD or CIA cooperation is a picture made with major input from that agency, including pervasive censorship and rewriting. It forced me to wonder: How many hours of my lifetime have I spent staring at movie screens and TV screens unknowingly absorbing DOD and CIA propaganda? Is this part of a military-industrial-entertainment complex? Theaters of War is a terrific teaching experience. It should also inspire a host of follow-up articles and a dissertation or two.”
— H. Bruce Franklin | American cultural historian and author of Crash Course: From the Good War to the Forever War

Dismantling General Dynamics with the Mapping Project

 

 

This month's Global Network video highlights the organization and website, The Mapping Project  

 
http://mapliberation.org/
 
The Mapping Project is a website full of resourceful information on the links between oppressive institutions, essentially "connecting the dots" of US Imperialism and local institutions in the Massachusetts area. The organization is made up of "multi-generational collective of activists and organizers" who wanted to:
 

"develop a deeper understanding of local institutional support for the colonization of Palestine and harms that we see as linked, such as policing, US imperialism, and displacement/ethnic cleansing. Our work is grounded in the realization that oppressors share tactics and institutions – and that our liberation struggles are connected. We wanted to visualize these connections in order to see where our struggles intersect and to strategically grow our local organizing capacities."

 

Sometimes the peace/antiwar movement gets too focused on the big guns, i.e. top 5 largest weapons corporations, and we forget that our local institutions are supporting the oppression of US imperialism. Our local universities, banks, police departments and other local institutions are sharing tactics and operations amongst themselves.
 
The Mapping Project reminds us that we need to build campaigns which focus on breaking these links to US imperialism, one by one. Each broken thread makes US imperialism weaker.

Odds & Ends

 

• Iranian warnings about domestic unrest should be taken seriously. If the turmoil in Iran continues, regional consequences could be grave.  For the United States, pursuing a conventional war against the Islamic Republic is a non-starter. If the US were to launch an invasion, as it did in the Iraq war, not only would it face difficulties capturing territory and suffer many defeats, Iran’s regional allies, along with its arsenal of ballistic missiles, could devastate Washington’s allies and military facilities throughout the Middle East. Such a war would be, in a sense, akin to a doomsday situation. Therefore, the only options that the US and its allies have to effect regime change in Tehran are through proxies and economic sanctions. See the entire article here

• Researchers in the United States have developed a new method for controlling the brain circuits associated with complex animal behaviours, using genetic engineering to create a magnetised protein that activates specific groups of nerve cells from a distance.

Understanding how the brain generates behaviour is one of the ultimate goals of neuroscience – and one of its most difficult questions. In recent years, researchers have developed a number of methods that enable them to remotely control specified groups of neurons and to probe the workings of neuronal circuits.

The most powerful of these is a method called optogenetics, which enables researchers to switch populations of related neurons on or off on a millisecond-by-millisecond timescale with pulses of laser light. Another recently developed method, called chemogenetics, uses engineered proteins that are activated by designer drugs and can be targeted to specific cell types.  See the whole story here 

• Leading the charge in a new generation of lunar exploration has been the China National Space Administration (CNSA), which has dispatched several probes to the moon from its Chang’e series. They have explored the far side of the moon and sent back the first lunar soil samples in 40 years.

The Chinese space program is working on a new type of nuclear power plant to be used to power a permanent base on the moon, which China hopes to build before the decade is out, the head of China’s lunar exploration effort told Chinese media on Tuesday.  See more here 

• Russian energy giant, Gazprom, said on Tuesday that Ukraine was diverting natural gas supplies transiting to Moldova, and the company has threatened to curtail deliveries through a key pipeline in response.

“The volume of gas supplied by Gazprom to the ‘Sudzha’ gas measuring station (GMS) for transit to Moldova via Ukraine exceeds the physical volume transmitted at the border of Ukraine with Moldova,” Gazprom’s statement read.

Moldova paid for some November gas supplies on Monday, according to Gazprom, which said that Kiev had kept 52.52 million cubic meters of gas meant for Moldova on its territory.  Find the whole story here

• Over the past days, Ukraine has targeted the area around the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, and the IAEA experts at the facility have confirmed there is widespread damage across the site.

"The Kiev regime continued provocations in order to create a threat of a man-made disaster at the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant. On November 21, artillery of the Ukrainian armed forces fired 8 large-caliber shells at the industrial zone of the nuclear power plant," the Russian defense ministry said in a statement. From RT  

• Pentagon Hiding Cost Of Ukrainian War - watch the short video here 
  

• More videos surfaced of Ukraine Nazi troops killing Russian POW's who were unarmed and lying face down on the ground. See it here

U.S. moving factories out of China

 

BORZZIKMAN

So, the process that everyone was so much afraid of is beginning. The United States is preparing for a serious confrontation with China. But what kind of confrontation can we talk about when your factories are located on enemy territory? It was expected that the Americans, preparing to fight China, would begin to transfer their factories from there to other countries. 

So the company Foxconn, the manufacturer of Apple devices, decided to invest $300 million in a new plant in Vietnam with 30,000 jobs. Vietnam already produces iPads and AirPods. In total, Foxconn plans to invest $1.5 billion in expanding production in this country. 

In the meantime, Microsoft also began to produce most of the Xbox consoles in Vietnam. 

And this year, in India, Americans will start production of the latest iPhone 14.

Awaiting Liberation: A Report from the Front and a Warning

By Batiushka for the Saker blog

If you are expecting dramatic news and pictures from the Donbass, where Allied troops are slowly but inexorably advancing, destroying thousands of Nazis of all Western nationalities and dozens of their military vehicles and piles of their equipment every week, as they liberate towns and villages (all unreported by the Western media), sorry. This is a story from the home front. It is a human story. I hope it brings it all home to you.

It is about a small town south of Kiev. Two years ago, Ukrainian (though they are Russians, as far as they are concerned) members of my family, a couple with two grown-up children, bought a brand-new house there. I have been there and stayed there. Last year. I know it well and the road from there to central Kiev. I could take you there now.

First of all, it is snowing. Photos sent to me show it. The long Indian summer is well and truly over. And the Russians have decided to use the same tactics as the Americans used in Serbia: launch missiles at the energy infrastructure. Thank you, USA, for your example of how to wage war.

The Ukrainian currency, the hryvnia, has dropped by 30% against the dollar, pound and euro. Everything that is imported has increased in price by at least that much. Many things by 100%. Though that is similar to the situation in Western Europe, where I now live. On top of that what you used to get from Russia is now unobtainable because of ‘sanctions’.

Only, in the Ukraine, this is against the background of the bankrupt economy being propped up by the US/UK/EU to the tune of billions of dollars per month. How do you fancy living in a country with a drop in GDP of 40% this year? And there is no sign of any change in the future, at least not until the Kiev regime collapses, Zelensky leaves for Miami from the roof of the US embassy via helicopter (remember Saigon?), Nazis cling to the outside of US aircraft taking off from Borispol Airport (remember Kabul?), other fanatical nationalists leave for Poland (some already have), and Russia liberates the whole country, as now seems necessary and inevitable.

Property prices in central Kiev have fallen. Many are trying to move out, as there are mainly flats and also the explosions are mainly in Kiev. Of course, if you are in a high-rise block, you will never sell unless you are on a low floor. Nobody wants to get stuck in a lift or, almost as bad, if you have to take your groceries up to the fifteenth floor by the stairs every day.

You have to do everything yourself. There are few workmen left because they have been abducted, screaming and kicking, into the armed forces. If they are lucky, they will be able to surrender to their Russian brothers before they get turned into body dust or shot in the back by the hated Ukrainian secret police. The workmen who are left charge astronomical rates. My relatives are very glad that they finally completed everything just a few weeks before it all began in February.

Last Thursday X saw a bad accident on the road nearby: the traffic lights were not working because of a power cut. That is happening all over. The streets are in darkness, no lights.

Many work from home, or used to. That is difficult now, because at best you only have three to four hours of electricity before it goes off for at least the same amount of time. There is no light. And then even the best batteries in a computer mean that you lose power after an hour or two – that is, if you have the internet, which is not all the time.

And remember to charge up your phone as soon as the power comes back on. The power will not last and may go off all day. You have no way of knowing. And when the power goes off, the boiler also goes off. No heating, no hot water. The windows are taped across in Xs against possible missile blasts, which would cause the glass to shatter. My relatives saw a missile going over last May. It landed in Kiev. 

And sometimes the washing machine will stop half-way through the cycle. Power-cut. That is inconvenient. And always remember to carry a flashlight in your pocket or handbag and have at least one other one in the house. Many are using Swedish-made primus stoves to cook – if you can get one and the refills. Some Swedes are doing well out of this.

As for shopping, well, the opening hours change with the power cuts, though corner shops remain open, if dark. And of course, Kiev has gone back to a cash economy. The card machines will not work – no electricity. Hopefully, the bank cash dispensers will get restocked often enough. That is, if you have money in your account.

My relatives do not have a car. Many of the Ukrainians who are wealthy enough to have cars drove to the West last March/April/May with their recruitment age sons (bribes of up to $5,000 a time to the border guards, who left last), and now live in cramped quarters in the houses of Western people naïve enough and once prosperous enough to take them.

My relatives are very lucky because they can get on minibuses to take them to their house in the country. Just a wooden affair, but there are vegetables there, especially potatoes, and lots of firewood. They had a busy summer in the large vegetable garden. They prepared for the winter, picking, bottling and pickling. The only way of heating there is putting wood in the stove. No gas, but then you do not need any. And you can even live without electricity, as there is a stock of candles. The only thing – it gets really cold there in the winter, -20 or -30 outside, -10 inside, unless you heat constantly. So you stay inside as much as possible and prepare lots of dry firewood for years before.

All of this is a warning to Western Europe. I know you are being distracted by the World Cup soccer circus. Do not be. You too voted for US puppet-leaders like Zelensky? You too wanted to be Ukrainianised by the US? Then this is your future too. You have been warned. I have friends in Latvia, Lithuania and Moldova. They are already living like this. This is a virus that is creeping westwards towards you.

You are seeing your future – unless you can get rid of your pro-Nazi puppet-governments in time. Elect Russia-friendly governments. Make friends with your neighbours next door, in the east of Europe. (Never heard of ‘love your neighbour’?). Moscow is 1,600 kilometres from Berlin, around 2,500 kilometres from Rome, Paris and London. You know it makes sense. You could be nice and warm soon.

Kiev tried to pressure Georgia into opening ‘second front’ against Russia

 

Soldiers at the Vaziani Military Base in Tbilisi, Georgia.

RT

Ukraine attempted to push Georgia into joining the conflict against Moscow, Irakli Garibashvili claims
Kiev tried to pressure Russia’s neighbor into opening ‘second front’ 

Georgia could have been turned into a “shooting range” if opposition leaders had managed to take control of the country, Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili claims. He said Kiev had tried to pressure Tbilisi into joining the conflict with Russia.

In an address to parliament on Friday, Garibashvili said that Ukrainian attempts to open a “second front” against Russia in Georgia were “not an interpretation, and not a legend,” but a “direct quote” from what was said at a press conference.

“These people [the Georgian opposition] are their [Ukrainian officials] allies. Imagine if these people had been at the helm of the Georgian government today,” Garibashvili said. “Does anybody have any doubt that a ‘second front’ would have been opened in Georgia, turning the country into a ‘shooting range?’”

Tbilisi has so far refrained from taking part in the Western sanctions imposed on Russia over its military operation in Ukraine, and Garibashvili stated in April that his country would not join the fighting, as it would run counter to Georgia’s national interests.

Shortly after Russia launched its military operation in late February, a number of officials in Kiev, including the secretary of the Ukrainian National Security Council, Aleksey Danilov, called on several countries, including Japan, Poland, Moldova, and Georgia, to open up a series of “second fronts” by attacking Russia and seizing such border regions as the Kuril Islands and Kaliningrad. No countries have so far taken Kiev up on the request.

Crooked laundry operation

 

Sunday song