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Western Delusions: The Violent Folly of Humanitarian Interventionism
Jean Bricmont
One can understand why some people might have sincerely thought that the Iraq war would be a "cakewalk". First, consider WW2 ; the US mercilessly bombed Germany and Japan, including their civilian populations, then occupied those countries militarily, imposing almost total control. Yet, today, Germany and Japan are among the world’s most faithful allies of the US. How deep this alliance really is and how long it will last remains to be seen, but for the moment it is a reality.
Now, consider the Cold War. Remember that, once upon a time, governments from Poland to Bulgaria were hostile to the US. Now, they want nothing more than integration into Nato, advanced US anti-missile shields and participation in the occupation of Iraq. Or consider, even more surprisingly, Vietnam, where US investors are now welcomed with open arms, while, in a not so distant past, the US was ferociously bombing Vietnam, killing millions of people and poisoning the environment. Even after the bombing of their little country in 1999, the Serbs behaved as desired, by voting out Milosevic and by accepting, at least for a while, pro-Western governments approving implicitely if not explicitely the bombing of their own country.
The Anatomy of the State
Murray N. Rothbard
What the State Is Not
The State is almost universally considered an institution of social service. Some theorists venerate the State as the apotheosis of society; others regard it as an amiable, though often inefficient, organization for achieving social ends; but almost all regard it as a necessary means for achieving the goals of mankind, a means to be ranged against the "private sector" and often winning in this competition of resources. With the rise of democracy, the identification of the State with society has been redoubled, until it is common to hear sentiments expressed which violate virtually every tenet of reason and common sense such as, "we are the government." The useful collective term "we" has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over the reality of political life. If "we are the government," then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical but also "voluntary" on the part of the individual concerned. If the government has incurred a huge public debt which must be paid by taxing one group for the benefit of another, this reality of burden is obscured by saying that "we owe it to ourselves"; if the government conscripts a man, or throws him into jail for dissident opinion, then he is "doing it to himself" and, therefore, nothing untoward has occurred. Under this reasoning, any Jews murdered by the Nazi government were not murdered; instead, they must have "committed suicide," since they were the government (which was democratically chosen), and, therefore, anything the government did to them was voluntary on their part. One would not think it necessary to belabor this point, and yet the overwhelming bulk of the people hold this fallacy to a greater or lesser degree.
This Time Is Different
Stephen Lendman
Whatever we know about today's financial crisis. Think we know. Eventually will know in the fullness of time. This time is really different. In 1922, Henry Ford put it this way in his book titled "My Life and Work:"
"The (economy's) primary functions are agriculture, manufacture, and transportation. Community life is impossible without them. They hold the world together....The great delusion is that one may change the foundation. The foundations of society are the men and means to grow things, to make things, and to carry things." Real enterprise producing value. Tangible products. Not casino capitalism. Computerized gambling. The illusion of wealth. Disappearing once liquidity dries up. Or even now when it's abundant. With a keyboard click, or when investors fear an approaching economic storm.
Don't be shocked by the defeat of America (God does not fix the work of the wicked)
Khaled Al Sharif
[Translated by Kirsten Beck (Original article in Arabic)]
The financial crisis and economic destruction afflicting the United States of America is about to blow her away. It's natural that Bush's imperialistic policy resulted in plunging into crusade-like wars against the Arab and Islamic world--a policy that inflicted a heavy financial burden upon the extremist U.S. administration in order to finance unjustified wars of intolerance and hatred in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the others; a policy that cost the U.S. Treasury 60 trillion dollars and that, in spite of all the financing, caused a huge economic disaster, the extent of which, beyond the certain defeat of the U.S. and NATO in Afghanistan, is unknown to anyone but God.
A recent preliminary strategy report confirmed that NATO and the United States will lose the war in Afghanistan, like what happened with the Soviet Union in the 80s of the last century and the British Empire in the 19th century. In a report by the strategic thinker Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, titled "Losing the Afghan-Pakistani War? The Rising Threat," Cordesman confirmed that the influence of the occupation forces is declining in Afghanistan, while the influence of Islamic resistance forces is increasing, providing proof and evidence backing up his findings.
Now the Cost of War Really Matters
By Kevin Zeese
The Finance Crisis Means the U.S. Can No Longer Continue Two War-Quagmires and Must Reconsider Military-Based Foreign Policy
Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz predicts the Iraq war will cost the United States $3 trillion. Nouriel Roubini, the economist who predicted today’s financial crisis in 2006, predicts the U.S. will suffer its worst recession in 40 years, lasting up to two years with 9% unemployment and another 15% drop in housing prices. He predicts we are seeing only the first round of government injection of funds into the finance system.
The Peter Principle Playoffs
Sheila Samples
We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men~~George Orwell So here we sit, our heads jerking back and forth so rapidly most of us are suffering severe whiplash. Will the US attack Iran? Will Israel attack Iran? Or will the two war-mongering bullies join forces and "bomb, bomb, bomb" that belligerent twit-nation into subservience?
It's a great game. A deadly game. The momentum to attack Iran has been building for so long that we're conditioned to watching it like some grotesque international tennis competition. It's the Peter Principle Playoffs, with neoconsters and ziomonsters out on the court milling around, working at their highest "levels of incompetence," feverishly plotting Iran's destruction. Foul lines mean nothing to them. There are no rules, no officials, no scores, no accountability.
World Food Day: Global Crises’ Double Standards
Ramzy Baroud
The 25th annual World Food Day, marked on 16 October, was an occasion whose arrival and passing received little media attention or governmental fanfare. Evidently, much of the world media and governments are consumed with an economic crisis of epic proportions, which is perceived in the US as the worst such upheaval since the Great Depression. In the rest of the world, it's depicted as the worst economic crisis in recent memory or, as the BBC termed it, "the most tumultuous times on record in the global financial markets."
This Election is too Important to Allow for Oversight...
Les Visible
That is what certain election officials are saying according to this article. It says that “Already states such as New Jersey are refusing to allow election experts to monitor voting because they claim it is “too important an election.” Ponder that sentence my friends. Turn it around and inspect it. The article also says that the new Associated Press poll from the greater Zionist media lockdown now shows the election to be a dead heat. Their reasons for this are as shabby as their conduct.
No, the Zionistas probably do not want Obama to win because he’s not as likely to be a dumbshit lap dog for their murderous intentions which have been amply demonstrated on 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and the shrill and nasty cries to bomb Iran; a country that hasn’t attacked another country in eight hundred years. He’s probably not going to be as easy to manipulate as McCheeks and Palindrone. He’s certainly not the scabrous psychopath that Yellow-Streak George the Drunken Fool is. Is he bought and paid for? Probably not entirely… I don’t think he’s gotten the bad news yet. That will most likely come after the election if he wins which is no sure thing at the moment, given what the neo-cons are up to.
Raiding the Icebox
Peter Carlson
Behind Its Warm Front, the United States Made Cold Calculations to Subdue Canada.
Invading Canada won't be like invading Iraq: When we invade Canada, nobody will be able to grumble that we didn't have a plan. The United States government does have a plan to invade Canada. It's a 94-page document called "Joint Army and Navy Basic War Plan -- Red," with the word SECRET stamped on the cover. It's a bold plan, a bodacious plan, a step-by-step plan to invade, seize and annex our neighbor to the north. It goes like this:
First, we send a joint Army-Navy overseas force to capture the port city of Halifax, cutting the Canadians off from their British allies. Then we seize Canadian power plants near Niagara Falls, so they freeze in the dark. Then the U.S. Army invades on three fronts -- marching from Vermont to take Montreal and Quebec, charging out of North Dakota to grab the railroad center at Winnipeg, and storming out of the Midwest to capture the strategic nickel mines of Ontario. Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy seizes the Great Lakes and blockades Canada's Atlantic and Pacific ports. At that point, it's only a matter of time before we bring these Molson-swigging, maple-mongering Zamboni drivers to their knees! Or, as the official planners wrote, stating their objective in bold capital letters: "ULTIMATELY TO GAIN COMPLETE CONTROL." It sounds like a joke but it's not.
The Politics of Heroin; CIA Complicity In The Global Drug Trade
Paul DeRienzo
[INTERVIEW] Alfred W. McCoy is professor of Southeast Asian History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Educated at Columbia and Yale, he has spent the past twenty years writing about Southeast Asian history and politics. Mr. McCoy participated in Causes and Cures: National Teleconference on the Narcotics Epidemic Saturday, November 9 1991, at Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan.
PD: How did you come to write The Politics of Heroin; CIA Complicity In The Global Drug Trade? AM: In 1971 I was a graduate student doing Southeast Asian History at Yale University. An editor at Harper & Row, Elisabeth Jakab, read some articles in a volume I had edited about Laos, which made some general references to the opium trade in Laos.
She decided this would be a great idea for a book and asked me to do a background book on the heroin plague that was sweeping the forces then fighting in South Vietnam. We later learned that about one third of the United States combat forces in Vietnam, conservatively estimated, were heroin addicts.
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