I’ll be taking a break now for a while. I have to devote some time elsewhere, in my own language, which is Norwegian.
Besides, as far as I’m concerned, there’s not much more to be said about the Ukraine war and the lies we so relentlessly are being spoon-fed by the mainstream press. There is not much more to be said, either, about the genocide being committed by Israel, the USA and the EU who are, moreover, virtually begging Iran to start world war III …, no, I’d better say no more.
It’s all so psychopathic that if I say anything else, I’ll be guilty of “hate crime”, and I would rather not go to jail.
I will however take the liberty of quoting Australia’s former Prime Minister Paul Keating. He was referring (in 2023) to NATO and to my country’s former Prime Minister:
Exporting that malicious poison to Asia would be akin to Asia welcoming the plague upon itself. With all of Asia’s recent development amid its long and latent poverty, that promise would be compromised by having anything to do with the militarism of Europe – and militarism egged on by the United States.
Of all the people on the international stage the supreme fool among them is Jens Stoltenberg, the current Secretary-General of NATO. Stoltenberg by instinct and by policy, is simply an accident on its way to happen. In February he was drawing parallels between Russia’s assault on Ukraine and China saying, ‘we should not make the same mistake with China.’ That is, that China should be superintended by the West and strategically circumscribed.
Stoltenberg, in his jaundiced view, overlooks the fact that China represents twenty per cent of humanity and now possesses the largest economy in the world. And has no record of attacking other states, unlike the United States, whose bidding Stoltenberg is happy to do.
As for the suppression and criminalisation of anti-Zionism in the USA and EU, it is better dealt with in the affected countries. (Norway has fortunately taken a different tack on that score at least.) In the USA, I think the most powerful voice against the suppression of dissident views, including not least anti-zionism, is Glenn Greenwald’s. I very warmly recommend Glenn Greenwald’s channel on Rumble.
My greater worries now, however, concern recent dramatic developments in my own country (no doubt with pressure from the “supreme fool”, the “accident waiting to happen” mentioned by Paul Keating): what to my mind is the virtual handover of Norway’s sovereignty to the USA. You will find very little information about this online. The press dares hardly whisper. Agreements have been signed according to which Norway gives the US the right to establish military bases in Norway’s 12 main military stations – bases in which the US will have exclusive right of access. There are those who maintain that the US armed forces will be able to carry on in Norway as though they were at home. It is reputed, for instance, that if any US citizen or members of his or her family commits a criminal act in Norway, he or she will not be prosecuted here; If a Norwegian citizen inadvertently trespasses on US security zones (in Norway!), for instance during the transportation of troops, the US forces may open fire on him/her.
Norwegian authorities will not have the right to inspect these bases, and nothing guarantees that nuclear weapons will not be stored there. We have long followed US orders in the matter of foreign policy, we are now finally a US puppet, virtually an occupied state, but nobody is rushing to defend us against the USA.
So I shall have to write elsewhere for a while, and in Norwegian.
I started writing here, as Pelshval, very many years ago and mostly for fun. I enjoyed embroidering picaresque scenes of daily life in my country.
Gradually, my voice grew less jolly, more cautious yet at the same time. slightly caustic. There were terrible droughts out there in the world, and sea levels were rising … but our leaders didn’t seem to worry, so maybe I was exaggerating the seriousness of our planet’s predicament.
Then came the Arab Spring. Now I happened to have some – not much, but more than most who follow the press – previous knowledge. So I soon noticed we were definitely getting skewed news reports. But I had a job that meant a lot to me, a job that required absolute loyalty, so I was mostly silent.
Nevertheless, seeds of distrust had been sowed.
During the Trump years I, too, was fascinated by US politics. While most of my friends could not “for the life of me” understand why anybody would vote Trump, I could not for the life of me understand why the Democratic Party was not learning a very important lesson. For a moment, it did seem as though Biden would actually start to notice the 50 % of US Americans who were floundering, but he soon devoted his attention to the needs of the military-industrial complex instead.
With time, I have become strident. I’m sorry. Reading William Blum’s Rogue State, I marvel at how he manages to make a book about catastrophic policy choices so wonderfully ironic and often downright hilarious.
It’s a while since I finally managed to discern, through the haze of propaganda, some of the contours of what is going on. But William Blum saw it all sharply already back in 2002. He foresaw what we are now going through, with such acuity that I suspect his book is available to us at CIA\library because even at CIA, there are those who understand that US foreign policy chickens have come home to roost in a very bad way.
There is so much that needs to be put right! More and more people all over the world and maybe even, to some degree, in the USA are starting to understand that. Alas, here in Europe, Ministry of Truth telescreens are running full throttle, incinerating the inconvenient truths of yesteryear, replacing definitions of sizeable parts of our vocabularies, updating fictions, smoothing innumerable paradoxes, and telling us that the end is near and not to worry. Staffing European psychiatric clinics will soon prove impossible as therapists succumb to the general state of universal befuddlement.
In an extremely depressing book called “Essay on Blindness”, the late Portuguese writer José Saramago has painted a stylised picture of the state of Europe today. He later wrote a cheering sequel, “Essay on Lucidity”, that explains how, one by one, people recovered their eyesight and were able to see clearly. While I certainly recommend many of Saramago’s books – he too is extremely humorous – I think it would prove more beneficial for Europeans’ lucidity (and hence also mental health) to read William Blum’s Rogue State, which can, I repeat be downloaded from the CIA library.
If I were the president, I could stop terrorist attacks against the United States in a few days. Permanently. I would first apologize to all the widows and orphans, the tortured and impoverished, and all the many millions of other victims of American imperialism.
Then I would announce, in all sincerity, to every corner of the world, that America’s global interventions have come to an end, and inform Israel that it is no longer the 51st state of the USA but henceforth—oddly enough—a foreign country. I would then reduce the military budget by at least 90% and use the savings to pay reparations to the victims.
There would be more than enough money. One year’s military budget of $330 billion is equal to more than $18,000 an hour for every hour since Jesus Christ was born.
That’s what I’d do on my first three days in the White House. On the fourth day, I’d be assassinated.
You will find this passage in “Author’s Foreword: Concerning September 11, 2001” in a book written by William Blum: Rogue State – a Guide to the World’s only Superpower.
The author is not particularly well known, despite his impressive erudition. Whatever fame has befallen him is due largely to praise he received from Osama Bin Laden, who allegedly quoted the above paragraph and recommended the book.
Surprisingly, William Blum (1933-2018) is not vilified in Wikipedia’s brief article about him, in spite of his sharp and detailed criticism of the long line of scandalous US military, economic and media interventions – all of which have had disastrous humanitarian consequences – all over the world. Judging from the article, he grew up in fairly modest circumstances. His education as an accountant will have seemed sensible rather than glamorous. He must have been very bright, because rather than work as an accountant, he became a computer programmer with IBM and was subsequently employed by the foreign service. A patriot, it would seem if we read between the lines, who subsequently was “disillusioned” by the Vietnam war.
Many others, of course, were also disillusioned by the Vietnam war. Many young US Americans were badly beaten by the police. Most of them recovered and went on to lead so-called “normal” lives.
But William Blum lost his cherished job with the State Department, something that did not deflate his interest in foreign affairs: He devoted the rest of his life to the solitary task of studying and writing about US foreign policy. Apart from the books he wrote, he also kept a blog that is still available to us. (By the way, I suggest you run a search in his blog for NED. William Blum knew very well what sort of sinister apparatus NED was and is.)
Reading Blum’s books, one cannot help being dumbfounded by the callousness, ignorance and recklessness of the entire string of presidential administrations since WWII. All the more reason, Blum must have thought, for him to try to tell his fellow citizens what was going on, and what – by the way – is still going on, though William Blum has been spared having to witness the latest consequences of US policies in the Middle East and Ukraine.
Several of his books, including The Rogue State are available on, for instance, Amazon. I should point out, though, that you can also download that particular book from, of all places, the CIA library.
Killing Hope, U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II was the book Noam Chomsky referred to with the words: “far and away the best book on the topic.” It is rather expensive, but I see that a free pdf version can be found.
More than 20 years have passed since the above-mentioned two books appeared. A long time, you might say. Many people will maintain that the USA has changed over the past two decades and is more observant of human rights, more humane. I’m afraid that such a view will seem doubtful in light of the ongoing genocide in which USA is deeply complicit. Insisting that Ukraine must be a member of NATO (most recently two days ago), at the expense of the vast and growing number of Ukrainian widows, is not very humane. (I mention the widows rather than the men, of whom relatively few remain, since dead soldiers no longer feel pain.)
A systematic US mistake identified by William Blum (e.g. in Vietnam in 1952, according to Graham Green in the novel The Quiet American) – a mistake made again, and again, and again – was to fail to understand the “adversary”. With blissfully arrogant ignorance, the US very recently set about using Ukraine to destroy or at least weaken Russia. The result was of course the decimation of the male Ukrainian population, while Russia has never been stronger.
Chapter 34 of Killing Hope is, I find, particularly illuminating. Here Blum discusses the details of the US-directed propaganda war in the run-up to the coup in Chile – 9/11, by the way, 1973. The population had to be prepared for the coup, had to be convinced that it was a necessary step to save the country from cutthroat Communists and from a Russian and/or Cuban invasion. The details are fascinating because I see some of the same tactics being employed in Norway today.
***
Alas, yes, my country, Norway, is a US vassal. Norway’s propaganda blitzkrieg these past two years has been staggering. Here nobody in his or her right mind dares dispute the official narrative that Russia’s military operation was “unprovoked”. Nobody dares call the war a US proxy war. There is no discussion, no debate, nothing, in a country that used to relish fierce political discussions!
I sent a couple of articles to one of the couple of independent websites that do actually dispute the official narrative, and I was warned not to reveal my name, as I might then lose my job and my friends.
To “defence”! Not to countering climate change; not even to green-washing, not to reduction of inequality, not to humanitarian aid.
No. To “defence”, i.e. to asist USA in its efforts to maintain global hegemony. To war. To a bellicose march under the US flag. Do we, Norwegians, want this? Do we even know that this is in store for us?
I am shattered. I am desperately ashamed of my country. This is how William Blum must have felt when he discovered what the Vietnam war was all about.
I’ve been reading a lot about Haiti lately, largely inspired by what I learnt a year or so ago, about the slaves who fought for and won their freedom from arrogant French landlords supported by French warships. Yes, the slaves were actually able to defeat Napoleon’s forces (20,000 soldiers and as many sailors) and to declare Haiti a sovereign Republic in 1804. That is a remarkable achievement.
[I]n August 1791 the first slave armies were established in northern Haiti under the leadership of Toussaint Louverture. …
Ultimately more than 50,000 French troops died in an attempt to retake the colony, including 18 generals. The French managed to capture Louverture, transporting him to France for trial. He was imprisoned at Fort de Joux, where he died in 1803 of exposure and possibly tuberculosis.
Wikipedia as at 31.01.2024
Napoleon is said to have explained in the midst of the war in Haiti: “My decision to destroy the authority of the Blacks in Saint Domingue (Haiti) is not so much based on considerations of commerce and money…as on the need to block forever the forward march of Blacks in the world.”
We can well imagine US slave owners’ horror at the success of the slave rebellion. So Thomas Jefferson refused to recognise Haiti. Other nations, too, imposed diplomatic and economic sanctions on the newly formed Republic. These embargoes froze Haiti out of the global economic market, and denied the burgeoning nation diplomatic participation in the international political scene. I’ll repeat two words here: “economic sanctions”. What would the goal of those sanctions have been, I wonder, if not the same as that of current sanctions: to punish, to starve and to cause suffering to the population. Back then when they had no internet, an additional aim will have been to reduce access to science and literature and hence to perpetuate ignorance.
What was new to me a year or two ago was not the slave rebellion as such, but that the French demanded that the slaves who had won their freedom in battle, pay compensation for their freedom! I assume the former slaves accepted these terms, partly to avoid being regularly revisited by the French army, and partly because payment for liberation was still the norm at the time. When the Russian serfs were liberated more than 50 years later, in 1861, the landlords had to be compensated, while the former serfs were left without roofs over their heads.
So Haiti was saddled from the start with colossal debts and had to take bank loans at exorbitant interest rates. Not until 1947 were they able to pay off the slave debt. Take a look at that sentence. Former slaves were paying for their freedom until 1947! From 1915 on, they were not even paying France, but the USA that had purchased the debt.
Yes, from the 20th century on, Haiti’s biggest problem (apart from earthquakes) has been its proximity to the USA. The USA has pretended that it is “helping” Haiti get back on its feet. Alas! To quote Kenan Malik’s very brief but wonderfully succinct article “Plundered and corrupted for 200 years, Haiti was doomed to end in anarchy :
“I helped make Haiti… a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues,” Maj Gen Smedley Butler, a leader of the American forces in Haiti, wrote in 1935.
I need to stop here and stress that I strongly recommend Kenan Malik’s article, because Haiti’s woes have been, throughout, so overwhelming, that most of us, give up trying to get our head around them. Malik’s article summarises things very neatly. But even Wikipedia admits that:
[t]he [US] invasion and subsequent occupation [1915-1934] was promoted by growing American business interests in Haiti, especially the National City Bank of New York, which had withheld funds from Haiti and paid rebels to destabilise the nation through the Bank of the Republic of Haiti with an aim at inducing American intervention.
Wikipedia as at 31/03/24 (my emphasis)
What soon followed was almost 29 years (1959 to 1986) of dynastic Duvalier dictatorship (Papa and Baby Doc) and death squads, which the U.S. unconditionally supported by providing economic and military assistance. Graham Greene explores this ghastly period in his depressing novel “the Comedians.”
Finally, Jean-Bertrand Aristide became the first democratically (and jubilantly) elected president in 1990 (with 92 % of the votes). But the US orchestrated no less than two coups d’etat against him and finally trucked him off to central Africa.
What has happened since is fairly chaotic, it is true. The key, however, is summed up by Kenan Malik in the above cited article:
The suppression of democratic movements became the constant thread of the nation’s history.
Of course, Haiti is not alone in this respect, but the country’s class differences have been exacerbated by the involvement of foreign governments, particularly the USA and more recently Canada. The US still runs Haiti one way or another, nominally through the so-called “core group” of ambassadors, and with the aid of its creation RNDDH, aka Orange DDH, a so-called human rights group (in reality a typical NED scam).
What is also clear is that the mission of Haiti’s police and military is to protect the comprador bourgeoisie and the elite,not the overwhelming majority.
Mainstream media is absolutely useless with regard to Haiti. What they describe, apart from effects of the earthquakes, is “gang violence”. Gang violence sounds bad, of course, but what do the gangs represent?
Are the gangs paid? If so by whom/why?
Are the gangs politically motivated? If so, how/why?
Who are the beneficiaries of the violence?
How have the funds disbursed by the USA and other countries been used? Is there any accountability?
Why is most of the population so desperately poor and uneducated despite considerable “aid” from the USA and allies?
No, mainstream media is mostly pretty useless. So do please visit Responsible Statecraft’sfresh article US should let Haiti reclaim its democracy which goes a long way in answering the above questions, and more. (Notice, for instance, President Biden’s attempt to persuade Kenyans to do the killing, and Kenya’s reluctance to do so.) Notice, finally, the article’s conclusion that the USA has to finally leave Haiti alone.
I think Haiti has served as a template for the very concept “failed state”. Let’s hope that Biden’s fear of loosing the looming US presidential election will dissuade him from enforcing another reign of terror on the island country.
I read in Reuters the other day about the annual World Happiness Report, launched in 2012 to support the United Nations’ sustainable development goals.
How, you may ask, can I even think about commenting “world happiness” when Gaza….? Yes, the mere mention of “happiness” seems a bit obscene, these days, when we – the West – are aiding and abetting unmentionable acts of horror.
But I actually believe that it is all, somehow, interconnected. What the West has been doing to the Palestinians for decades will forever be a hideous stain on the record of an era that is coming to an end. In the West, mood is affected both by an emerging awareness of the harm we have done to the rest of the world and to the growing signs that our welfare is being eroded.
People in 143 countries and territories have been asked to evaluate their life on a scale from zero to 10. Finland scored 7.7 followed closely by the Scandinavian countries (including Iceland), and Israel, while Afghanistan and Lebanon, at the bottom, scored next to nothing. Palestine, of course, wasn’t asked.
So that’s the main findings – not very heady, but the Reuters journalist David Milliken has done a good job, I think, because he took a good long look at the 52-page report, and because he pointed out a few very interesting findings, I downloaded the report too.
Findings: The United States dropped to 23rd place from 15th last year, mainly because people younger than 30 would have placed the United States in 62nd place! (See figure 2.2) Biden and Trump, beware!
And that is the very interesting part of the report. In several of the wealthiest countries there appears to be growing dissatisfaction among the young (defined as under 30). The young in Norway put the country in 20th place, those in the UK in 32nd. Rankings for Germany and France were 47 and 48, for Canada 58 (whereas for all ages the Canadian ranking was 15) Spain 55… etc.
Russia’s young at 68th, however, are slightly more positive than the average, 72, whereas Israel’s young put their country in 2nd place! Young Israelis must have been very blind, indeed.
Yes, the times they are a’changin. For the worse in the West, mostly, though Lithuania’s young put their country in first place.
The report reads: “In Western Europe, life evaluations among the young are significantly lower in 2021-2023 than they were in 2006-2010…For the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, happiness has decreased in all age groups, but especially for the young.”
“Interconnected” was the word I used above. The so-called Pax Americana, that never was a Pax at all, is in the process of being exposed. The colossal hoax to which we in the West have been blind, is unravelling. The West’s irresponsible militarisation, the preposterous US debt (and remember, the dollar is the reserve currency, so when the dollar falls, we all fall), the deepening poverty of the bottom 50 % coupled with the spiralling wealth of the top 10 %, the brazen disregard for the accelerating ecological breakdown… all of this crowned now by the shame felt by those of us who are not psychopaths (and we are, fortunately, the vast majority) about our countries’ participation in acts so horrible that I am lost for words… will continue to undermine “happiness” in the West in years to come until the USA stops being such a bloody bully.
Ms Nuland “retired” at the age of 62. I suppose she could afford it.
Few people noticed her until her famous 2014 “fuck the EU” in a dialogue with the US Ambassador in Ukraine was leaked. The dialogue exposed US involvement in Ukraine in 2014.
She was
acting Deputy Secretary of State
former CEO of the the “think tank” Center for a New American Security (CNAS) which, according to Wikipedia as at 14 March 2024, was funded by “[n]early 30 defence contractors, including Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon; NATO; several foreign governments, including Taiwan and United Arab Emirates; the oil companies BP and Chevron; investment banks including Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase; technology firms, such as Facebook, Google, and Microsoft; the U.S. Department of State, and two different Pentagon offices.” (cf. Glenn Diesen’s book The Think Tank Racket.)
board member of National Endowment for Democracy (NED) which is frankly funded mainly by the US government. While CIA operations used to be entirely covert, they are now to some extent conducted through innocently sounding organisations such as the” National Endowment for Democracy”.
married to Robert Kagan.
The two of them were identified, already in 2015, as a dangerous duo devoted to the Military Industrial Complex.
I suggest you take a look at Robert Wright’s article in Responsible Statecraft: A case study in American propaganda (June 12, 2022). I am going to quote a single innocuous sentence from that article, which I think is very well worth reading:
But there are two things about the Institute for the Study of War that you may not know.
Search, please do, for the numerous occurrences of the word “Kagan” in that article. I have no insight into how much they have invested in the “military industrial complex” or how much money is paid out to them every time the USA engages in a new military project. I leave that to your imagination. Anyway, Victoria is gone.
Alas, neocon delusions of US global supremacy are not, so do not count our chickens …
She has been replaced by Kurt M. Campbell who,
for a time, was a vice president of the “think-tank” Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) which, according to Wikipedia as at 19.03.2024, has received major funding from defence contractors such as Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon Company and General Atomics, etc., etc….
co-founded and was CEO of the “think tank” Center for a New American Security (CNAS) which, as we know, was funded by “[n]early 30 defence contractors, including Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon; NATO; several foreign governments, including Taiwan and United Arab Emirates; the oil companies BP and Chevron; investment banks including Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase; technology firms, such as Facebook, Google, and Microsoft; the U.S. Department of State, and two different Pentagon offices.”
The Wikipedia article about him suggests he might be more interested in China than in Russia. We shall soon see, I fear, when they step up the military pressure around Taiwan.
We are speaking, by the way, of the assistant, or “deputy” if you will, Foreign Minister, not the “Defence” Minister.
I definitely don’t like the way women are treated in Iran, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. And I most emphatically do not approve of putting dissidents in prison, either. And as for torture… no! no! no! (If you tortured me to force me to endorse torture, I would probably give in, but those who love me, and their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren – and there may be many of them – would make sure that you and your lot (and offspring) never sleep easy.)
Nevertheless, the idea that a pompous king or emperor and his court should stride through the corridors of the world, passing judgements and rigorous sentences on “misbehaving” members of the global community is repugnant. All the more so, if said king or emperor is himself decadent and given to all sorts of vices (including torture!)
Vice President Harris is reputed to have been “tough on crime” in her past. (I gather she is not popular in her current position either.) Anybody who has had anything to do with miscreants will know that harsh punishments stimulate, rather than diminish, destructive urges. Yes, there are exceptions, but they are not the rule. Rather than tell you what you know – about US criminal justice, that is – I shall simply refer you to a United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report:
In the United Kingdom, reoffending rates also topped 70 per cent in some prisons, according to statistics from the Ministry of Justice. Many offenders, even after severe sentences of imprisonment, repeatedly fail to desist from crime and reintegrate into the community as law-abiding citizens. Imprisonment, in itself, is incapable of addressing the offenders’ social integration issues. [highlighted by me]
…
… In addition to the costs of law enforcement and investigating and prosecuting crimes, there are the costs of imprisonment, as well as the costs to the victims and the community.
Consider also the effects of prison overcrowding and smouldering community anger. Look at Haiti now!
So it is, not only with individual delinquents, but also with nations.
The US should know that patriotic sentiment – nationalism, if you will – is something to be reckoned with. In spite of the near civil-war-situation in the USA, US Americans love their country passionately. Iranians do too. Iran was, after all, practically the cradle of civilisation. Iranians have a history and cultural heritage compared to which US history and cultural heritage is still in kindergarten. The same applies to China and even to Russia, where historical awareness and pride is a force that ignorant US politicians have disregarded. (That the US establishment is so unbelievably ignorant should terrify US voters.)
As for Cuba and Venezuela, relatively new countries, they have been heroic in the extreme: Like the USA they stood up to the colonial power, but they have since also stood up to the North American bully! And they are proud of their heroism. (Note, by the way, how many US Americans and Europeans have loved Cuba.)
By the time it was Venezuela’s turn to suffer the tightening of the sanction screws, the Western press was better prepared than they had been after the Cuban revolution to unleash defamation campaigns against Hugo Chavez. Even John Pilger could not save Chavez’ reputation in the West. But Venezuelans, and a very large (probably growing) proportion of Latin Americans warmly revere the late Hugo Chavez, which is one reason why Maduro is still comfortably seated.
Unfortunately, the USA has no respect for Democracy in Venezuela, or for that matter in any other country that resists US political and economic control, which is why they have applied sanctions that more or less kill off Venezuelans.
Quoting a CEPR (Center for Economic and Policy Research) report:
According to the National Survey on Living Conditions (ENCOVI by its acronym in Spanish), an annual survey of living conditions administered by three Venezuelan universities, there was a 31 percent increase in general mortality from 2017 to 2018. This would imply an increase of more than 40,000 deaths. This would be a large loss of civilian life even in an armed conflict, and it is virtually certain that the US economic sanctions made a substantial contribution to these deaths. … As noted above, the impact of the August 2017 sanctions on the collapse of oil production and therefore access to imports was quite immediate…[highlighted by me]
The United States first imposed sanctions targeting the Venezuelan government in 2015.
Since then, sanctions have multiplied to the point that millions of ragged Venezuelans have turned into unwelcome itinerant paupers roaming the rest of the South American continent where they constitute as seriously a destabilising demographic force as the Central American immigrants to the USA. Decades of US regime change operations and support for vicious dictatorships in all of Latin America are the root cause of all of this displacement.
Sanctions particularly affect health care (medicines and gear), cf. The Lancet
Soon after imposing economic sanctions on a country, many essential life-saving drugs become unavailable. Even production of some drugs being manufactured in a country is decreased, or even stopped, because of a shortage in basic ingredients or spare machine parts that are necessary for drug production. The price of drugs increases to a level that people with low income can barely afford. …Lack of spare parts affects not only medical devices but also other necessary infrastructures such as electric generators; frequent power cuts cause serious problems (loss of vaccines, drugs, ventilators, monitors, etc). Hundreds of thousands of people die in silence from diseases.
Have those who approve of sanctioning a country considered the surviving victims’ hatred, accumulated incrementally year by year? Have those who design US foreign policy any idea of the growing global contempt for the US “rules-based order”?
What rules?
Who made the rules?
And why do the so-called “rules” – whatever they are – not apply to the USA?
Why do NO rules apply to the USA?
Listen to this angry but extraordinarily knowledgeable young man, Ben Norton, explain Latin American anger.
The government in Caracas, however, somehow survived for reasons that differ, depending on the political position of the analysts. In Venezuela, much credence is being given to the country’s socialist values, the resilience of the people and to the Bolivarian movement. The anti-Maduro forces in the US, centred mostly in Florida, blame Maduro’s survival on Washington’s lack of resolve. A third factor, which is often overlooked, is Russia.
I would like to add, though, a detail that does not seem to interest the mainstream media or even Mintpress: The Venezuelan authorities prioritised food imports and food subsidies according to another CEPR report.
Food imports in 2020 are similar to those in 2017 ($2.0 billion in 2017, $1.8 billion in 2020) despite total imports and GDP falling by around 50 percent during that period. The decline in import capacity that occurred after 2016 did not lead to lower food import levels because the government found a way to prioritize food imports. An overhaul of public sector food assistance policies, and in particular the launch of a system of nationwide distribution of food packages (known by the acronym CLAP, for Local Committees of Supply and Production) to families in need in 2016, appears to have played an important role in addressing food insecurity. In 2020, the subsidy received by families through the CLAP system was $855 million, or almost 50 percent of the country’s total food imports. [highlighted by me]
Venezuela is not the only country whose population is being castigated by the USA. The above CEPR report which examines the effect of “sanctions”, includes three detailed “case studies”: Iran, Afghanistan and Venezuela.
The so-called “Democratic” USA arrogantly disregards the global majority of countries that condemn the imposition of sanctions all over the place.
Yes, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was in contravention of International Law. Yes, yes and yes.
ButUS unilateral sanctions are also in contravention of International Law!
Articles 39 and 41 of the United Nations Charter empower the UN Security Council to adopt “measures not involving the use of armed force” in response to the existence of “any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression”:
Article 39: The Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression and shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken in accordance with Articles 41 and 42, to maintain or restore international peace and security.
Venezuela represented no “threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression”. Ever. The USA just didn’t like the Venezuelan administration.
I have been, and am still, stunned by the sadism of the Israeli government and its military — as well as by the US, UK, and German governments’ enthusiastic endorsement of genocide. Good heavens, what a bunch of psychopaths makes up the top echelons of our western societies! The events in Gaza recently prompted Craig Murray to write that he had now understood that his “belief in some kind of inherent decency in the Western political Establishment was naive.”
Bush was once the laughing stock of the world when he ranted about the potentially “nukiller” country, Iran’s, being part of “the axis of evil”. I’m afraid I’m tempted to backslide to that particular Bushism. No adjectives in any dictionary I know of can adequately describe the depravity of the acts being carried out in Gaza with energetic western support.
Meanwhile, however, many other issues go unheeded. Take for instance the current troubles in Haiti, a failed state since the USA finally broke that country’s back in 2004.
The extraordinary idea nurtured by successive US governments that they may – indeed must – play the role of Global Top Gun is absolutely mind-boggling. The oddest thing of all is that most citizens in NATO countries don’t seem to mind. Not for nothing are US citizens taught the US catechism: “We are the biggest and the best.” Not for nothing have the rest of us been force-fed Hollywood films night after night, decade after decade.
Most US Americans don’t know, of course, what damage their country wrecks everywhere it goes, and are therefore completely innocent, because corporate media is not “free” to tell them. Nor is the UK mainstream media (MSM) free to tell its citizens. Or the Norwegian MSM, for that matter. There are, admittedly, a few independent sources of journalism, but we are instructed to consider them Russian propaganda outlets and their journalists are – we are told – conspiracy theorists.
So aggressively opposed are our governments to freedom of information, that they are even willing to dismantle fundamental principles of Democracy (with, e.g., the Patriot Act in the US and, in the UK, the National Security Act of 2023 and the updated Official Secrets Act.) Moreover, the Julian Assange case illustrates just how far the UK is willing to go in order to block exposure of UK/US crimes against their own and other countries’ citizens. His case is, from a legal point of view, a travesty of the British legal system, which turns out to be no more committed to justice than judiciaries in countries with which Western countries do not care to be likened.
So that was the good news, not that the dying people of Gaza will know of it, I’m afraid.
The bad news is that Galloway’s party, which could in theory rally quite a large proportion of badly deceived British voters, will be hounded by the MSM and government spokespersons and will be the butt of ceaseless defamation campaigns, the first of which started the moment his victory was announced.
As for Haiti, the US is not the only country to have defiled what must once have been a land of milk and honey. The French economist Thomas Piketty writes in Chapter 6 of Capitalism and Ideology about the blood money exacted by the French Government from its former Haitian slaves between 1849 and 1915, after which the “debt” was taken over by the USA which occupied (and virtually again enslaved) Haiti from 1915 to 1934 and continued to demand payment from its victims until 1950! (My translation of the titles of the two relevant sections in Piketty’s book is France: the double abolition of 1794-1848 and Haiti: When slavery is converted into public debt,) They explain the background of Haitian demands towards the French government.
Actually, you don’t have to read those two sections (though I do recommend that you read the entire book), but you really should read the excellent article in Responsible Statecraft: “From couptochaos: 20 years after the US ousted Haiti’s president”. It explains how the US with its visceral loathing of Articles 25 and 26 in the Declaration of Humans Rights plotted and organised the demise of the extremely popular and democratically elected Aristide.
In the article you will also find a link to the story of how the Haitian slaves heroically defeated and drove away their French owners and how they, the former slaves, subsequently had to pay the former owners (and later also the USA) compensation for loss of property, i.e. them – the former slaves.
For many countries all over the planet, the USA has been and is still the serpent in Paradise (I’m expanding on the above referenced Bushism). USA does believe in some human rights, such as the right to chose between Scylla and Charybdis during elections, provided, of course, the voters chose the candidate previously groomed for them by the USA (e.g. Guaido in Venezuela). This last proviso does not, admittedly, apply to NATO countries (on which the USA occasionally has to rely for its nefarious military operations all over the planet, currently off the coast of Yemen). USA also believes in the right to carry a gun, though I’m uncertain as to where in the Declaration of Human Rights that right is enshrined.
So you see, there has never really been any reason to suspect the upper echelons of society of even a sliver of what Craig Murray calls “decency”. We have just been docilely led by the nose.
The events immediately preceding Russia’s entry into Ukraine have been the subject of furious debate (not in my country, true enough, where any scepticism regarding the dominant narrative is fiercely cancelled.)
I think those events have been made sufficiently clear, by now, for us to understand what happened and why it happened.
What has not been discussed much is: Just what is Ukraine? What is the history of Ukraine? Putin tried to give Tucker Carlson a crash course on the subject, but of course the powers-that-be define “whatever Putin says” as intrinsically wrong.
Now I happen to have read quite a lot of Russian history these past months, but rather than share my views with you, I warmly recommend an article by Craig Murrey who cogently explains a few salient points. In addition to touching upon historical aspects, he also has some refreshing advice regarding a solution to the conflict. I think some of us — myself included — have what you might call an attitude problem. So having read his article, I stand chastened.
The Munich Security Conference, held annually, is allegedly the world’s leading forum for debating – guess what – international security. In other words, it is not the opera and it is not open to the public. I add for the record that it makes no headway safeguarding international security, but that is another matter. Its participants are not boy scouts – cf. this year’s list of participants. (Russia, of course, was not invited.)
So why was Yulia Navalnaya attending the Munich Security Conference on 16 February, the day the conference opened?
Yulia Navalnaya was attending the Munich Security Conference on 16 February, the very day Alexei Nalvany died. Now wasn’t that remarkably convenient? She was already there and ready to hold an impassioned speech for which she received a standing ovation. I’d call that divine intervention, if ever there was such a thing. But again: What on earth was Julia Navalnaya doing there in the first place? She’s not a security expert, for Pete’s sake
So who, or rather what is she?
Which begs the question: Who, or rather what was Alexei Navalny?
