War in Africa and War in the Americas: Accelerating the End of White World Supremacy

 

 By Ajamu Baraka

“The structural crisis of capitalism in its neoliberal form has created a legitimacy crisis for the capitalist rulers, making the use of force a permanent strategy for maintaining their dominance.” ployment of troops to Ecuador and the bizarre AFRICOM plan to insert Kenya and Rwanda forces all the way from Africa to Haiti to support the illegitimate Ariel Henry puppet government in that nation.

This is madness, but desperate madness!

Experiencing their worst nightmare, the French are in the process of being expelled from their African empire. They have desperately drawn the line in Niger, where they had been forced to redeploy their troops after being expelled from Mali. The military has now taken power in Niger and the people have filled the streets of its capital Niamey carrying Russian flags and demanding that the French and the U.S. be expelled from their country with their drone bases, including the mother of all drone bases in Agadez that cost over 100 million dollars to build..

We know, however, that they will not leave peacefully. The people of Iraq demanded that the U.S. leave and their forces are still there, just as they remain in Syria stealing oil and wheat. The people of Haiti demand no intervention but the arrogance and psychopathology of white supremacy compels its leaders to ignore the peoples of the world and rely on what they understand best – violence and domination.

There is no mystery as to why Western European powers are behaving this way as they face the prospect of a world in which they can no longer impose their will and extract the value produced by the world’s peoples and lands for their greater glory. They have concluded that they need to fall back on the very instrument that established Western hegemony in the first place – war in its most extreme expressions.

The violence at the center of the relationship between the European colonizer and the colonized “other” has not changed since Europeans spilled out of Europe into the Americas in 1492, only its forms have taken new shapes.

Since the end of the second imperialist war in 1945, the war that was supposed to end all wars, at least in Europe it was thought, the U.S. as the new leader of the Western imperialist world established the standard of behavior for how the colonial/capitalist West would relate to the non-European world. Even as it proclaimed commitments to human rights and democracy, the U.S. waged wars on every continent, overthrew governments, murdered and tortured anti-colonial fighters, and actively supported murderous wars by its European allies.

 

The colonial relationship was the lifeblood of Western dominance and colonial powers waged wars from Algeria to what became Zimbabwe to maintain that lifeline in old and new ways. Their efforts were the most brutal in parts of the world where they had significant numbers of white settlers like in Algeria, Kenya, Israel, and South Africa. Their goal was to duplicate “successful” white settler projects in the U.S., Canada, New Zealand, and Australia where they used genocidal methods to conquer indigenous peoples, steal their land and often their children, and hold the survivors in colonial bondage up to this day.

But change is in the air. With the exposure of the U.S. as a paper tiger after its defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan, and its defeat in Ukraine that is yet to be announced to the U.S. population, the peoples of the global South, and in particular in Africa, are in no mood to accept the continued humiliation meted out by the institutions of White colonial/capitalist domination.

This is why when the 15-member Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), working on behalf of African elites and their Western bosses, said that it would “take all measures necessary,” including  “the use of force” against the Niger military within a week to restore to power the deposed president Mohamed Bazoum, the response was very different from what would have occurred just a few years ago.  Unlike in the past, when Western elites issued orders through their neocolonial puppets and these were followed without opposition, Algeria said that it would not sit aside if Western powers attacked Niger, similar to statements from the government of Guinea, and the military leaders of Burkina Faso and Mali threatened war if the U.S. and France attacked Niger, even if they did so through the Black face of ECOWAS.

“Peace is not the absence of conflict, but rather the achievement by popular struggle and self-defense of a world liberated from the interlocking issues of global conflict, nuclear armament and proliferation, unjust war, and subversion through the defeat of global systems of oppression that include colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.” (BAP principle of unity )

The struggle for peace is the struggle against Western imperialism led by the U.S., which continues to reveal itself as the greatest existential threat to collective humanity. The U.S. shamelessly declares its commitment to the national security strategy it calls “full spectrum dominance,” the doctrine that guides its project to maintain its global (and even planetary?) hegemony. This doctrine is buttressed by European support from the nations grouped under the NATO military umbrella.

The project is to maintain and advance white power through material and institutional means. And what is meant by global white power? Western dominance through the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, control over the global banking system, NATO and the other parts of the U.S. global military apparatus, and U.S. Dollar hegemony. That is how the Black Alliance for Peace defines white power.

 

But there is more.

White power and the ideology of white supremacy are inextricably linked. The ideology of white supremacy posits that the descendants of the peoples from the territories now referred to as Europe represent the highest examples of human development, that their culture, social institutions, religion, and way of life are inherently and naturally superior. This ideological position is normalized by the international capitalist cultural and ideological apparatus – media, entertainment industry, and Big Tech.

For the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP), white power and white supremacy “cannot be reduced to [the] individualized attitudes and values of people racialized as white. Instead, it should be seen as a structure of domination that is also ideologically embedded in every aspect of U.S. and European society to the extent that it has become normalized and, consequently, invisibilized as general common sense.”

Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Lloyd Austin, Donald Trump, Anderson Cooper, Joe Biden, Paul Kagame (president of Rwanda), William Ruto (president of Kenya) and most of the Black misleadership class in the U.S. are white supremacists.  

The normalization of white supremacy and the acceptance of white power requires societal-wide self-deception, as Black philosopher Lewis Gordon argues . It not only exposes the limits of reason and history as expressed in the hegemonic liberal philosophical tradition. In the process of Eurocentrism becoming universalized through the colonial project, white supremacy and white power represent the negation of history and reason. The “coloniality of being” is not an abstract philosophical concept. It is real, and as such, is a fundamental target for us to transform in the decolonial project.

That is why we reject the premise that the European world that created what Frantz Fanon referred to as “a zones of non-being” in all the areas they colonized, completely rejecting the humanity of the colonized to undertake the most ruthless and barbaric exploitation of lands and peoples, are today concerned with well-being, humanity, democracy and “human rights” in Haiti, Niger, Cuba, Palestine, and the barrios and working-class “hoods” of the U.S.

What nonsense.

Only the most naive would believe that Europeans today, with their newfound “humanitarianism” and “responsibility to protect,” have in fact altered the historical category of permanent “other” to which they relegated Africans and other colonized peoples’. As U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney declared in the 1857 Dred Scott decision in the U.S. settler-colonial context, Africans “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

No, we will not be confused by high-minded declarations from the ruling classes of the most vicious empire in the history of humans on this planet.

The U.S. and European capitalist ruling classes continue to be committed to waging war to avert the end of white world hegemony. This is attested to by U.S. global command structures, including the over 800 military bases, the bipartisan support for the obscene military budget, NATO, and the U.S.–Russia proxy war in Ukraine. It is also demonstrated by the continued militarization of police forces, the mass-incarceration regime, and the infiltration, disruption and subversion of our organizations, including indictments of the Uhuru 3 and increased use of the category of “domestic terrorist” to criminalize opposition.

The lines of resistance are being redrawn.

Led once again by Africans on the continent and in the African diaspora, there will be popular resistance to the armed assault on Haiti. On the continent, the leadership of Mali and Burkina Faso made it absolutely clear that an imperialist attack on Niger will be understood as an attack on Mali and Burkina Faso and they would respond in kind.

The war being waged by the west has intensified.  Now it is moving into a new period where its one-sided nature is being replaced with a more effective resistance.  The task is clear for us: to accelerate the end of the existential threat that white world hegemony poses for collective humanity.  

~ Ajamu Baraka is Chairman of the Coordinating Committee of the Black Alliance for Peace and an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S. based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) and the Steering Committee of the Black is Back Coalition. 

Africans must rise up against U.S. and French colonizers

 

 

Wongel Zelalem

Americans are so uptight

 

Eritrea is 'not bowing' to the west

 

 

BreakThrough News

Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki declared at the Russia-Africa Summit that “There is no Russia-Ukraine War. This is war declared by NATO on Russia” based on the “hegemonistic fantasy” of dominating containing all independent countries “big or small.”

Scott Ritter on our current nuclear predicament

 

 

Alfredo Bolduc

Scott Ritter warns that America's stated, strategic plan is to destroy Russia will spell the end of life on the planet. Why? The US has unilaterally withdrawn for all nuclear arms treaties that have kept us safe since Reagan signed the first treaty with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987. It was "Trust but Verify" back then.

On top of this, the US has declared its "first strike" nuclear policy. Russia will not adopt such a policy, but has declared that any threat on its existence or territory will result in Russia unleashing its entire nuclear arsenal...and we are all dead. Nobody wins in a nuclear war, not even a "limited" nuclear war.

Ritter elaborates on how the US uses soft power, color revolutions to put in place governments that toe the American line. In the case of the Republic of Georgia, it is to create a "second front" on Russia's border that will cause Russia to move troops from the war in Ukraine to the border with Georgia. 

Add it all up and the USA is begging for a nuclear war.

Is there any hope? Be sure to watch this video to the end. 

Don't tell me what I can read.....

 

We got one local guy

who sits on the PeaceWorks list-serve

and beats down any news sources

that don't fit the CIA narrative.

Then he proclaims to rep the 'peace movement'

and speaks bitterly about anyone who dared

fall for the Putin-ista line.

 

Since we moved to Maine in 2003

I've never seen him

at a peace protest,

especially at BIW in Bath,

where he lives just blocks away.

 

I try my best

to ignore him

but have experience

with government plants

in our 'peace groups'.

In my eyes he works

in some way for Mr. Big,

or at least is auditioning

for a part in the shadow

screen play.

 

The latest 'masterpiece' from this bloviator was in response to an excellent article by David Talbot entitled All the News the CIA Sees Fit to Print. I sent it to the list-serve knowing that he would salivate as he banged on his keyboard in feigned outrage. Didn't take long for him to respond as per usual.

 

I believe this genius supports Biden or some other Democrat who will rescue the nation. The Dems keep declaring this coming 2024 election will be 'the most important election in our lifetime'. But in the end they don't really do anything except start war$ and rip the people off.

 

The more fake news that is owned and manipulated by Mr. Big, the more the corporate oligarchs stay on top. But they need willing accomplices in Washington, in the courts, on Wall Street, Madison Avenue, Hollywood, and at the far too numerous military industrial sites across the land - all deeply embedded into local culture. 

 

And they need their eager mouthpieces to sit watch on peace list-serves in places like Brunswick, Maine.

 

It's a helluva time we are in....

Previously on the blog I have posted this:

 

David Talbot wrote the book The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government.  I would say without any hesitation that this was one of the top 3-4 most important books that I have ever read.  I highly, highly recommend that everyone read it.

There is so much I learned from the book and I've been studying the whole US-Nazi connection after WW II for many years - but author David Talbot really wrote a spell-binding book - it's like reading a mystery story.  You come away from the book with a very clear understanding how the US became the corporate fascist state that we have today.  

Bruce 

'We shall never forgive atomic bombs'

 

 

The Higashi-Hiroshima Mixed Choir is active in singing together with those who lost their lives in the war and atomic bombing. 

I heard this song in 1985 during my first trip to Tokyo-Hiroshima-Nagasaki and then on to Fukuoka. I went as representative of national Mobilization for Survival which the Florida Coalition for Peace & Justice (I then coordinated) was an affiliate.

After the events on August 6 and 9 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki I was invited to return with the local peace group from Fukuoka to their city for a couple days. It was a very meaningful trip. When I left Fukuoka I was given a tape of Japanese peace songs (that included Japanese and English versions of this song) and it has stuck in my heart and head all these years later.

I recall this moving chorus line from the English version quite well:

Fishing boats are idle, their owners are blind, deadly harvest of two atom bombs....so landsmen and seamen you must watch and take care, that the third atom bomb never comes.

Many thanks to my friend Makiko Sato for finding me this video clip. I looked but could not find it.

Bruce  

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Today 9th August Observed silent Protest at Gandhi statue for Abolition of Nuclear war heads in land and space. Global Network [Visakhapatnam chapter] with Indian peace org Organised the meeting with Prof Surappadu from Andhra University Is the chief Guest.

Prof Urged the UNO to intervene in Russian Ukrainian war for peaceful Settlement. Around 25 members of different groups Participated.
Thank you
Prabhakar JV
AP, India

Postscript to the Ukraine peace gathering in Jeddah

 

By Gilbert Doctorow

As I anticipated, the BBC reported briefly this morning that the gathering in Jeddah over the weekend to discuss Ukrainian proposals for peace ended without any concrete results.  This did not prevent today’s edition of The Financial Times from calling it a success because of the attendance by China and China’s affirmation that it will participate in such discussions in the future. I further expect that the same kind of Big Lie claim of victory in what is in reality a blatant defeat will be attempted by the United States and its allies when the Russians recapture Kharkov, the Ukraine’s second largest city, and snatch up the whole of the remaining Ukrainian coastline on the Black Sea by overrunning Nikolayev and Odessa. This could come in as little as a couple of months from now, given the near destruction of Ukrainian strategic reserves these past couple of months and plans of the Kremlin to go on the offensive once the Ukrainian counter-offensive abates and before the onset of the rainy season in autumn, which works against large scale military operations..

What rabbits will Jake Sullivan, Blinken and his colleagues at the State Department try to pull out of a hat then? What will happen then is also now taking shape. The Poles, with U.S. encouragement, will move into Lvov and Western Ukraine in what is called a defensive deployment of peacekeepers to prevent further Russian aggression and the United States will say that it has preserved Ukrainian sovereignty in the face of overwhelming Russian military force and the incompetence of Zelensky and his generals. We may safely assume that Zelensky will have been physically ‘neutralized’ by that point to avoid his whining about U.S. treachery to the global press.

The problem for the Biden administration is that it will put forward these transparently phony claims of victory in the midst of the 2024 presidential campaign, when its Big Lie will come under fierce attack from the Republicans Donald Trump and Ron Desantis on the one hand and on the other hand from Robert F. Kennedy in the Democratic camp.

Meanwhile, as regards the costs to the EU Member States of their foolhardy subordination to Washington on sanctioning Russia, we can thank The Financial Times for its article today putting figures on the losses booked by energy companies, banks and other major businesses which sold their Russian operations under fire sale conditions or have seen them confiscated by the Russian state as compensation for Western seizures of Russian state and private assets in the EU. In the best of circumstances, they retained title but have been required to report the assets they still own as ‘impaired’ for accounting purposes since no dividends or principal can be transferred abroad. The number offered by the FT is over 100 billion euros in losses.  Add to that the economic losses to the general population in the EU due to vastly inflated energy costs following the turn away from Russian hydrocarbons.  The FT says nothing about that, but I would guess it exceeded 200 billion euros if we take only the publicly reported ameliorative measures of Germany and several other EU countries to compensate individuals and companies for the energy price shock.

The net result of these Western losses approaches the Russian financial losses in Europe and America. So where is the Western ‘win’ in its ‘sanctions from hell’ applied to Russia?

~  Gilbert Doctorow is an independent political analyst based in Brussels. 

History lesson: Britain's opium trade impoverished Indians

 

Two opium factories run by the British were located on the Ganges River.

By Soutik Biswas

In Amitav Ghosh's acclaimed novel, Sea of Poppies, a village woman from an opium-producing region in India has a vivid encounter with a poppy seed.

"She looked at the seed as if she has never seen one before, and suddenly she knew that it was not the planet above that governed her life; it was this minuscule orb - at once beautiful and all-devouring, merciful and destructive, sustaining and vengeful."

At the time when the novel is set, poppy was harvested by some 1.3 million peasant households in northern India. The cash crop occupied between a quarter and half of a peasant's holding. By the end of the 19th Century poppy farming had an impact on the lives of some 10 million people in what is now the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. A few thousand workers - in two opium factories located on the Ganges river - dried and mixed the milky fluid from the seed, made it into cakes and packed the opium balls in wooden chests.

The trade was run by the East India Company, the powerful multinational corporation established for trading with a royal charter that granted it a monopoly over business with Asia. This state-run trade was achieved largely through two wars, which forced China to open its doors to British Indian opium. 

 

British, French and American navies defeated China during the Second Opium War. China was forced to pay Britain's war costs. The victors took control of Beijing, chased the emperor away then looted and destroyed the old Summer Palace.

 

 

Historian William Dalrymple, author of The Anarchy, a new book on the East India Company, says it "ferried opium to China, fighting the opium wars in order to seize an offshore base at Hong Kong and safeguard its profitable monopoly in narcotics".

Some historians have argued that the opium business bolstered India's rural economy and kept the farmers happy. That was not the case, as new research by Rolf Bauer, a professor of economic and social history at the University of Vienna, has found.

For years Dr Bauer trawled through archival documents looking at the costs of producing opium and paying money to farmers.

He also examined an exhaustive history of the trade - the 1895 Report of the Royal Commission of Opium, which ran into seven volumes and 2,500 pages.

It contained 28,000 questions and hundreds of witness reports on the use and consumption of opium in India, and studied how the colonial government regulated its production and consumption.

The result of the research is published in Dr Bauer's new study of the trade, The Peasant Production of Opium in Nineteenth-Century India. His conclusion: the opium business was hugely exploitative and ended up impoverishing Indian peasants. "Poppy was cultivated against a substantial loss. These peasants would have been much better without it," Dr Bauer told me.

 

An opium examining room inside a factory in northern India

 

This is how the East Indian Company ran the trade. Some 2,500 clerks working in 100 offices of a powerful colonial institution called the Opium Agency monitored poppy farmers, enforced contracts and quality with police-like authority. Indians workers were given commissions on every seer - a traditional unit of mass and volume used in large parts of Asia - of opium delivered on their beat.

In the thriving, state-run global trade, exports increased from 4,000 chests per year at the beginning of the 19th Century to more than 60,000 chests by the 1880s. Opium, says Dr Bauer, was for the large part of the 19th Century, the second-most important source of revenue for the colonial state. It was only outmatched by land taxes. (India remains the world's biggest producer of legal opium for the global pharmaceutical market.)

"The government's opium industry was one of the largest enterprises on the subcontinent, producing a few thousand tons of the drug every year - a similar output to Afghanistan's notorious opium industry today, which supplies the global market for heroin," Dr Bauer says.

More importantly, the crop, he adds, had a "lasting negative impact on the lives of millions".

Interest-free advance payments were offered to poppy farmers who could not access easy credit. By itself, this was not a bad thing for those producing for the global market.

What made it bad for them, according to Dr Bauer, was what they paid for rent, manure, irrigation and hired workers was higher than the income from the sale of raw opium.

In other words, the price peasants received for their opium did not even cover the cost of growing it. And they were soon trapped in a "web of contractual obligations from which it was difficult to escape".

Stiff production targets fixed by the Opium Agency also meant farmers - the typical poppy cultivator was a small peasant - could not decide whether or not to produce opium. They were "forced to submit part of their land and labour to the colonial government's export strategy".

Local landowners forced their landless tenants to grow poppy; and peasants were also kidnapped, arrested and threatened with destruction of crops, criminal prosecution and jail if they refused to grow the crop. "It was a highly coercive system," Dr Bauer says.

By 1915 the opium trade with China, the biggest market, had ended. However, the British Indian monopoly on opium continued until India won independence in 1947. What confounds Dr Bauer is "how a few thousand opium clerks controlled millions of peasants, forcing them to produce a crop that actually harms them".

It's a good question.

No U.S./French-backed invasion of Niger!

 

By Sara Flounders

“When Africa becomes economically free and politically united, the monopolists will come face to face with their own working class in their own countries, and a new struggle will arise within which the liquidation and collapse of imperialism will be complete.”
– Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of imperialism

August 6, [was] the deadline issued by the Economic Community Of West African States (ECOWAS) for the current government of Niger, headed by Abdourahamane Tchiani, to abdicate power or face a possible military intervention by ECOWAS forces. Tchiani came to power through a military coup, which has been condemned by imperialist powers such as the United States and France, who have a vested interest in maintaining a foothold in Niger.

Demonstrations in Niger support the new government, along with targeting the French embassy, a symbol of brutal French colonialism and exploitation of Nigerien people. (Nigerien refers to the people of Niger; Nigerian refers to the people of Nigeria)

Niger is a target of imperialism for many reasons. Its natural resources include uranium, which supplies up to one third of France’s entire electrical grid. Yet Niger remains one of the poorest countries in the world with the majority of its over 27 million people lacking access to their own electricity. Niger also holds strategic importance to the U.S. military as a hub for its drone operations in Central Africa, used to maintain U.S. influence in the region as well as assist in French military interventions. 

In addition to 1,500 French troops, there are over 1,000 U.S. troops stationed in Niger, which the U.S. government now refuses to withdraw, despite the security agreements between the U.S. and Niger being suspended and multiple European countries evacuating their citizens. The U.S. military machine is digging in, hoping to restore the pro-imperialist government by whatever means necessary.

Sanctions against Niger have already been implemented, but a military option remains on the table, through which the U.S. and France will be able to use ECOWAS security forces as a proxy. France has given its full support for an ECOWAS intervention, although many African countries have been hesitant to participate. Algeria, Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Mali – all former French colonies – are among the countries that have come out in support of Niger against imperialist threats.

African opposition to invasion of Niger

The governments of Burkina Faso and Mali issued a joint statement, asserting that any attempt at military intervention to remove Tchiani would be taken as a declaration of war against both their countries. “The transitional governments of Burkina Faso and Mali, One: have expressed their fraternal solidarity of the people of Mali and Burkina Faso with their brothers in Niger who have decided of their own accord to take their destiny in hand and to assume their sovereignty. Two: Denounce the persistence of the regional organizations to apply sanctions that aggravate the suffering of the population and imperil the spirit of Pan-Africanism. Three: Refuse to apply these illegal, illegitimate and inhumane sanctions against the Nigerien people and authorities,” Four: Any military intervention against Niger would be tantamount to a declaration of war against Burkina Faso and Mali.” the statement read. (africanews.com, Aug. 1)

Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu, who is also the current ECOWAS chair, has authorized the deployment of Nigerian soldiers against Niger; they would make up the bulk of ECOWAS forces. However, the Nigerian senate voted not to approve this deployment.

The refusal of other neighboring countries to participate in the U.S. and French-backed ECOWAS invasion, as well as the hesitancy of the people within the countries whose leaders advocated for invasion to actually carry it out, shows major fractures in the imperialist grip over West Africa after hundreds of years of colonialism.

Niger was one of the last remaining governments friendly to the U.S. empire in the Sahel region. Put into power by a series of earlier coups, the governments of Mali and Burkina Faso cut ties with French colonialism and expelled French troops. Since then, ECOWAS has established its own military presence to attempt to prevent anti-colonial coups from taking place within ECOWAS member states, without U.S. or French troops intervening directly.

Some of the new African governments are working with the Wagner Group – mercenary forces based in Russia – to control and repress local Islamic State-affiliated groups. These ISIS-like armed groups have been a security concern for countries in the region since NATO aggression destroyed Libya in 2011 and destabilized the region. U.S. and French imperialism have used these groups’ existence as a pretext for military intervention.

 

Workers World Party affirms the right of Niger’s people to take the fate of their country into their own hands. We oppose any U.S. or French-backed military invasions, sanctions, or meddling in African politics. We support the expulsion of all U.S. and French troops and the dismantling of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM).

We support the right of African nations to make economic and security relationships on their own terms with other countries, including with Russia and China, rather than being forced into a position of subjugation as a neo-colony of imperialist powers like the U.S. or France.

We oppose any U.S., French or NATO plans to launch yet another major proxy war. Such a war would spread havoc in the region in its attempt to maintain economic dominance over and perpetual super-exploitation of the African people.

~  Sara Flounders is a New York-based political writer and has been active in progressive and anti-war organizing since the 1960s. She is a member of the Secretariat of Workers World Party, as well as a principal leader of the International Action Center.

Arrogant Macron helped trigger West African rebellions

 

 

Video of French President Emmanuel Macron publicly racially abusing and embarrassing former Burkina Faso President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré has resurfaced and is going viral. 

Never again!

 

 

Sunday song

 

 

Imran Khan's appeal to the Pakistani nation

 

Pakistan’s former prime minister Imran Khan has been arrested after a court in Islamabad sentenced him to three years in jail and banned him from politics for five years for 'corrupt practices' involving the sale of state gifts. 

In a video message Khan had recorded before his arrest and which was later released on Twitter, he called on his party members and followers to take to the streets in protest. He said if people were watching the video it meant he had been arrested and imprisoned. 

He said his political struggle was not for himself but for the country and its future.

Khan ended his short statement saying, “Chains don’t fall themselves — they have to be broken.”

RFK Jr. goes full-bore for Israel

 

The Jimmy Dore Show

This is a sad situation for me to deal with. So many things RFK Jr. talks about I support. His lifetime work on the environment has been courageous. His exposure of the corrupt Big Pharma industry has been life saving for many. 

His description of 'corporate capture' of all US government agencies is right on the money. It's basically Mussolini's definition of fascism - the wedding of corporations and government. 

His personal experience of being censored by the mainstream media and even elements of the so-called alternative social media is a warning to us all. That is where things are quickly heading.

But his position on Israel confuses me and leaves me deeply concerned. 

I've seen a couple of his interviews on Israel that shockingly show that he is nothing more than a mouthpiece for the Zionist apartheid state.

So my wandering mind takes me on a path of discovery. I've got to find out why RFK's usual critical analytical capabilities miss this one. 

Is it because his family's deep roots with the Democratic party makes it impossible for him to imagine going against the many leaders in the party who are Zionists? We know several of his family members are working inside the Biden Neo-con regime - including his cousin Carolyn Kennedy.

Caroline has been Biden's Ambassador to Australia since 2022. She previously served in the Obama administration as the United States Ambassador to Japan from 2013 to 2017. 

While on a couple peace delegations trips to Okinawa it was instructive to hear local peace activists tell how they had repeatedly tried to get a meeting with then Ambassador Kennedy to discuss their strong opposition to the Pentagon's massive (and environmentally destructive) base expansion on their islands. Kennedy always refused.

Her work as Obama's ambassador to Japan I am confident meant she worked hard on behalf of the military industrial complex to increase pressure on Japan to mobilize to fight China. And now Ambassador Kennedy is doing to same with America's other major Pacific region ally - Australia.

The Democrats are inter-woven with the imperial capitalist agenda. RFK knows most of them - he grew up around and had personal connection with many inside the deep state. He knows how things work in Washington. Despite his many good works, he appears not willing to take on Mr. Big when it comes to Israel.

Is it because the Zionists control much of the money and media that presidential candidates rely on? Is it because he fears that many Dem party primary voters are strong Israel supporters?

In the video above Jimmy Dore reveals his sadness as he recounts all the issues that RFK has illuminated for him. But Jimmy ends by telling RFK 'you are risking your peace candidacy' over Israel. Has RFK made the strategic determination that the 'peace movement' is weak and divided and thus not such a big loss?

When I had Covid two Decembers ago I was very sick for a month. Added to the Covid I had pneumonia as well. But I never took the Big Pharma jab and have never regretted that choice. 

Kennedy had something to do with my decision to refuse - even in the midst of all the social pressures. 

During that month of illness I read his book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.  I recall in an interview RFK suggested to read the last chapter first as it spells out the history of the US military long running the secret program to  weaponize viruses for use on the global public.

So I appreciate and respect all RFK has done on so many issues for many years. But I just can't trust someone who avoids the reality (for what ever his reasons) of Israel's brutal, despicable, arrogant, illegal and immoral occupation and treatment of the Palestinian people.

In his campaign announcement RFK said he would always tell the truth. It's obvious that when it comes to Israel he has broken that promise. 

Can't vote for that. 

Bruce 

 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. They also cover the latest Trump indictment with a special guest. 

U.S.-NATO going to war in west Africa next?

 

Wongel Zelalem

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Response to Niger coup may escalate into ‘world African war’ – expert 

RT

“We are now at the door of a world African war,” African Freedom Institute President Franklin Nyamsi said on Thursday in an RT interview. He added that should the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) take military action, as threatened, to remove Niger’s new government, such allies as Burkina Faso and Mali will likely come to the country’s defense. 

ECOWAS and the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) imposed sanctions on the new Nigerien government last week, suspending all financial transactions and freezing the country’s assets in ECOWAS-member states. Regional development banks cut off all assistance, as did the EU and France. The US and the African Union also threatened to follow suit. ECOWAS demanded that the junta restore Bazoum, who has been under house arrest since the coup, by August 6 or face military action by the regional bloc. 

Nyamsi argued that ECOWAS was acting on behalf of US and NATO interests, as did Bazoum, and had no authority in its charter to attack one of its members. The ECOWAS heads of state who back the bloc’s response to the Niger coup are dictators who have been responsible for government overthrows in their own countries, Nyamsi claimed. 

“They’re working for foreign interests, imperialist neocolonialist interests,” he said. “And the organization is permanently following the decisions of French political powers, of European political powers, of American political powers.” 

A military intervention by ECOWAS would be a “declaration of war” not only against Niger, but also against dissenting members, including Burkina Faso, Mali and possibly Guinea, he added. “Those countries have clearly stated that they are against the repetition of what happened against Libya in 2011,” when NATO overthrew the government, killed President Muammar Gaddafi and armed Islamic terrorists, Nyamsi said. 

The result was greater destabilization of the Sahel region, which continues to this day, the activist claimed. “It is unbelievable that ECOWAS involves itself in a new attack on NATO’s inspiration against African interests and just because capitalistic oligarchy at the head of NATO has a lot of intention of keeping its hand on the wonderful natural resources of Africa,” he said. 

The two ECOWAS factions – pro-NATO vs. pan-African – might not only fight each other, but also seek assistance from their powerful allies, Nyamsi said. Niger’s backers would likely call on Russia, China and Iran for help. “Possibly they want to export a world war in Africa between, finally, the two main blocs of the old Cold War,” he warned. “We don’t need that in Africa.”

Coming great speaker in Brunswick: Koohan Paik-Mander from Hawaii

 

In Brunswick, Maine on Sunday, August 13 from 4:00-6:00 pm. Event will be held inside the Brunswick Library (23 Pleasant Street). 

  Koohan getting rave reviews on her current national speaking tour linking space, land, air and ocean militarization to latest Pentagon planning. 

 

According to the Doomsday Clock, the time is 90 seconds to midnight — the closest humanity has ever been to the end of the world.

Things have never looked so dire. Modern civilization is hurtling toward cataclysm on every front, all at once — nuclear stockpiling, carbon emissions, and rising sea levels. A war raging around a nuclear power plant in Ukraine. The plan for AI-driven war commanded from space. The installation of whale-killing sonar infrastructure beneath the ocean. The push to produce more plutonium pits for new nuclear warheads.

Yet we seem to be stuck in an intractable holding pattern. Our elected officials keep making the wrong decisions, spending more billions on the war machine and cutting budgets for human needs. The media keep reporting in ways that polarize. It seems as if it’s all part of some grand diabolical scheme. But is it? Who would be responsible? Could it be a globalist cabal? Maybe the Military Industrial Complex? Is it capitalism itself? Who or what is behind it? Is there any hope?

Koohan Paik-Mander, a Hawaii-based journalist, author and peace and environmental activist, will discuss humanity’s inability to lift itself out of the “race to the bottom.” She will also describe the tens of $billions earmarked in the national war budgets to fast-track AI, even though unmanned, space-based warfare will kill our oceans and severely hobble the planet’s inherent capacity to regenerate itself in the face of systems collapse.

Ukrainian army is broken

 

 

Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom

 

Always good interview between these two men.  Andrew Napolitano and Col. Douglas Macgregor 

Isn't it really sad that we only have Libertarians and Republicans in the U.S. who are consistently speaking out strongly against the US-UK-NATO proxy war on Russia utilizing Ukraine as the storm troopers?

Where are the 'liberal Democrats' who for many years claimed to be peaceniks? Not a word from any of them. Instead they are lockstep behind the warmongering Neo-cons who clearly are running the Biden administration. 

The Democrats are leading the forces in Congress that keep shoveling massive amounts of $$$$ down the war shit hole. Washington has sent well over $160 billion so far to Kiev's corrupt regime. Renowned journalist Seymour Hersh has reported that Zelensky and his cronies have raked off $400 million of those funds.

At the same time the Dems pretend to care about the homeless, the poor, the working class and those who have lost their jobs during the pandemic. They pretend to care about those who suffer without adequate medical care. Our roads, bridges, schools, local sewer and water systems are falling apart. But the Dems offer nothing but platitudes.

NATO is dead and is now preparing a disastrous plan to fight against China. How will that turn out?

The insanity in Washington, London, Brussels, Paris, Berlin and Kiev is beyond imagination. When will people in those nations rise up?

Ukraine continues to grab young men off the streets and forces them to the front lines and certain death. Increasingly these unwilling troops are refusing to fight and are surrendering to the Russian military. 

See interviews with Ukrainian troops who are telling their sad stories here.

Bruce

The war that kick-started the Neo-con rampage

 

 

 

 

Katie Halper

Journalist and historian Vijay Prashad https://twitter.com/vijayprashad talks about the real reason NATO bombed Yugoslavia and what it has to do with the war between Russia, Ukraine and, in a way, The United States.  (Full chat is available at https://www.patreon.com/posts/patreon...)

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter https://independentmediainstitute.org He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books https://mayday.leftword.com/ and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research https://t.co/evQYuwZXRJ. 

He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.

Propaganda Over A Shirt Pocket

 

Art by Bill Park

 

The vast majority of Americans are

Good Germans.

Hitler has always been America's great

example of true evil, while the brutality of the

U.S. Empire goes undiagnosed.

Over 750 U.S. Military Bases around the World.

Since the end of World War II, the U.S. has

bombed over 30 countries.

Americans entertain themselves into oblivion,

while their government and military gets on

with the business of violently exploiting other

countries for unfathomable control and profits.

U.S. citizens pretend to live in a sacred democracy.

In God We Trust.

Propaganda always hides the secrets of the

American Dream.

Gott Mit Uns

The Lies are closer than breathing,

nearer than hands and feet.


By Mike Hastie
Army Medic Viet Nam