CIA-Linked General Poised to Win Guatemalan Presidential Election
Democracy Now! explores accusations of genocide against Presidential hopeful General Otto Molina Perez, and examines US foreign policy in Latin America with particular regard for the ongoing ‘War on Drugs’:
Media Roots Radio: Spying, Fear & Self-Censorship, Building Up Your Community
Via Media Roots:
This discussion covers U.S. imperialism: wars, costs, media and government propaganda; the culture of fear, self-censorship and the erosion of privacy in the US; information as power and how communication is an important tool to strengthen and build communities.
Self-Hatred vs. Self-Love: An Interview with Eric Walberg
Gilad Atzmon writes on Media With Conscience:
Two weeks ago I published a review of Eric Walberg’s invaluable new book Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games. I was left with a few questions which Eric was kind enough to address.
Gilad Atzmon: Hello Eric; thanks for finding the time to talk. I would like to begin if I may, with a few short questions: firstly, what is self-hatred?
Eric Walberg: Buddhism is based on the annihilation of the self. Islam – on the total submission of self. It’s at the heart of Christian beliefs too. (I don’t know about Judaism.) Self-hatred has respectable roots.
GA: I totally agree with you. However, I wonder, are you a self-hater? I ask because in your writing, you seem to be deeply familiar with that kind of intellectual adventure.
EW: In some way, I like Woody Allen’s riposte “I may be self-hating but not because I’m a Jew.” The self…
Christopher Hitchens Vs. Noam Chomsky on Osama Bin Laden
Hitchens Photo: Trockennasenaffe (CC) / Chomsky Photo: Duncan Rawlinson (CC)
Christopher Hitchens takes issue with Noam Chomsky’s recent Guernica article in Slate:
Anybody visiting the Middle East in the last decade has had the experience: meeting the hoarse and aggressive person who first denies that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center and then proceeds to describe the attack as a justified vengeance for decades of American imperialism.
This cognitive dissonance — to give it a polite designation — does not always take that precise form. Sometimes the same person who hails the bravery of al-Qaida’s martyrs also believes that the Jews planned the “operation.” As far as I know, only leading British “Truther” David Shayler, a former intelligence agent who also announced his own divinity, has denied that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, took place at all. (It was apparently by means of a hologram that the…
The Human Agency of Revolution
Scholar Tarak Barkawi argues revolutions are caused by human agency; not telecommunications technologies, in Al Jazeera:
To listen to the hype about social networking websites and the Egyptian revolution, one would think it was Silicon Valley and not the Egyptian people who overthrew Mubarak.
Via its technologies, the West imagines itself to have been the real agent in the uprising. Since the internet developed out of a US Defense Department research project, it could be said the Pentagon did it, along with Egyptian youth imitating wired hipsters from London and Los Angeles.
Most narratives of globalisation are fantastically Eurocentric, stories of Western white men burdened with responsibility for interconnecting the world, by colonising it, providing it with economic theories and finance, and inventing communications technologies. Of course globalisation is about flows of people as well, about diasporas and cultural fusion.
But neither version is particularly useful for organising resistance to the local dictatorship. In…
Juan Cole: Libya Is Not Iraq
Is the bombing of Libya Obama’s Iraq redux? Informed Comment says no, laying out the factors that make the Libyan intervention ethical, non-imperialist, and fundamentally different from Bush’s 2003 invasion. Convincing or not?
On the surface, the situation in Libya a week and a half ago posed a contradiction between two key principles of Left politics: supporting the ordinary people and opposing foreign domination of them. Libya’s workers and townspeople had risen up to overthrow the dictator in city after city. Even in the capital of Tripoli, working-class neighborhoods such as Suq al-Jumah and Tajoura had chased out the secret police. In the two weeks after February 17, there was little or no sign of the protesters being armed or engaging in violence.
Then Muammar Qaddafi’s sons rallied his armored brigades and air force to bomb the civilian crowds and shoot tank shells into them. Members of the Transitional Government Council in Benghazi…
The American Military’s New Fiefdom: Egypt
With the American military as its greatest benefactor, the Egyptian military has assumed control of the day-to-day functions of government, but which direction will this force take and who under whose auspices are members of the Egyptian military operating?
FMF funds totalled 1.8 B in FY 2009, who do you think is in charge?
Is this move towards military rule a remnant of the previous administration’s new domino theory in the middle east or the first decisive step in the new administration’s new “plan” for the region? The Project for the New American Century spent many years strong-arming an already pliant Bush administration into increasing military aid to regions like the middle east, but only to regimes it could “work with“.
Consider this excerpt from diplomatic cables addressed to a General Schwartz from 2009:
Your visit will fall on the anniversary of the April 6, 2008 nation-wide strike protesting political and economic conditions. At least one…
Ex-Canadian Defense Minister Says Aliens Have Visited Earth: Hawking Is Wrong About Them
CTV News reports:
Stephen Hawking’s warnings of an alien invasion have prompted a vigorous defence of extraterrestrials by their most prominent Canadian fan. Former federal defence minister Paul Hellyer, 86, believes not only that aliens have visited Earth but also that they have contributed greatly to human technological advances.
So he can’t quite understand why the world renowned astrophysicist views them with such trepidation; Hawking recently warned that malevolent aliens could lead to the destruction of humanity.
The longtime cabinet minister accuses Hawking of spreading misinformation about extraterrestrials.
“I think he’s indulging in some pretty scary talk there that I would have hoped would not come from someone with such an established stature,” Hellyer said in an interview.
“I think it’s really sad that a scientist of his repute would contribute to what I would consider more misinformation about a vast and very important subject.”
Hawking speculates in a new documentary that most extraterrestrial life will be…
Stephen Hawking: Aliens Might Kill Us All
Jonathan Leake writes in the Times:
The aliens are out there and Earth had better watch out, at least according to Stephen Hawking. He has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist — but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact.
The suggestions come in a new documentary series in which Hawking, one of the world’s leading scientists, will set out his latest thinking on some of the universe’s greatest mysteries.
Alien life, he will suggest, is almost certain to exist in many other parts of the universe: not just in planets, but perhaps in the centre of stars or even floating in interplanetary space.
Hawking’s logic on aliens is, for him, unusually simple. The universe, he points out, has 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. In such a big place, Earth is unlikely to be the only…
Playground Politics: Geopolitics Made Simple By Children, On a Playground (Video)
From HBO’s Funny Or Die Presents, the lesson learned from this episode featuring the USA and Africa is: “If you have natural resources, then you’ll receive food…”
Many Are Dying For Our Having Hoped Obama Would Not Practice Imperialism
In retrospect, does it not sound terribly naive that we would hope a U.S. president whose candidacy was selected and backed by our most powerful bankers would be permitted, just maybe, perhaps by virtue of his being black and well spoken, to modify the intense imperialism that has characterized all previous presidencies since, if not including, that of Teddy Roosevelt and before?
He said he would bomb Pakistan and he has.
He indicated he would be willing to sacrifice men, women and children to assassinate leaders of those warring against American occupations and he has.
He said he would, and he did, send more troops to broaden the war against Pashtun Taliban, formerly the Reagan approved and recognized government of Afghanistan.
He has praised Americans for having fought the Vietnamese in their own country and keeps American troops in Iraq, though he called Iraq a “dumb war.” when seeking the votes of citizens no longer…
The Virginia Colonists at Jamestown Practiced Cannibalism
Another chapter from my book 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, inspired by historian Howard Zinn, who passed away earlier this year.
For more me, check out: The Memory Hole.
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During the harsh winter of 1609–1610, British subjects in the famous colony of Jamestown, Virginia, ate their dead and their shit. This fact doesn’t make it into very many U.S. history textbooks, and the state’s official website apparently forgot to mention it in their history section.
When you think about it rationally, this fact should be a part of mainstream history. After all, it demonstrates the strong will to survive among the colonists. It shows the mind-boggling hardships they endured and overcame. Yet the taboo against eating these two items is so overpowering that this episode can’t be mentioned in conventional history.
Luckily, an unconventional historian, Howard Zinn, revealed this fact in his classic, A People’s History of the United States. Food was so…
Oil in Haiti – Economic Reasons for the UN/US Occupation
From the Pakalert Press blog, an October 2009 article by Marguerite Laurent:
There is evidence that the United States found oil in Haiti decades ago and due to the geopolitical circumstances and big business interests of that era made the decision to keep Haitian oil in reserve for when Middle Eastern oil had dried up. This is detailed by Dr. Georges Michel in an article dated March 27, 2004 outlining the history of oil explorations and oil reserves in Haiti and in the research of Dr. Ginette and Daniel Mathurin.
There is also good evidence that these very same big US oil companies and their inter-related monopolies of engineering and defense contractors made plans, decades ago, to use Haiti’s deep water ports either for oil refineries or to develop oil tank farm sites or depots where crude oil could be stored and later transferred to small tankers to serve U.S. and Caribbean ports. This…
