#terrorism is bombing other countries just because we have a capital interest

[therealandian]

ngl in light of the everything going on in the us rn i kinda want a bumper sticker now with the current wealth disparity graph just so it really sinks into anyone who sees it that we're so significantly the majority and we have basically none of that wealth. like on one hand seeing it makes me feel p hopeless ngl. but on the other, it pisses me off. something tells me it'd piss a lot of other people off, just not at me

[juniaships]

After being reminded of how awful canon film is I wrote my own self indulgent version of Batman Vs. Superman. I want the story to be self contained, so no Doomsday or Darkseid forewarning. Warning: Rambling, me being butthurt while high on sugar, really trying to make this a coherent storyline with genuine development, some Bruce x OC moments shut up you demon!

The beginning is the same as in canon with Lois in Africa???Middle East??? With her partner James Olsen trying to resolve a hostage situation. James gets killed trying to protect a hostage, but before anymore are killed Superman comes in and rescues them. He subdues not kill the terrorists but gets into trouble with the intelligence agency for interrupting their mission. This incident reaches the ears of Helen Hunt's character the no-nonsense Senator. However Superman is more concerned for the deceased James and the unharmed hostages than getting in trouble with the government, he feels guilty being unable to save James in time.

After James Olsen's funeral Clark and Lois are unsure what to do next. They decide the best way to honor his memory is continuing their line of working bringing light to troubling issues as well as a troubling rose of villains. They also find out that the terrorists had weapons given to them by Luthor (to protect interests in that region).

Meanwhile, Lex decides to capitalize on the post destruction of Metropolis by launching a smear campaign. He also starts pursuing charitable events to make himself look good in front of the masses. Because of growing negativity towards Supes, Clark starts feeling a lack of confidence but from reassurance from his mom he redirects his focus hero by doing small stuff around Smallville. Gradually the town starts to see him in a far better light but there's still Metropolis and the larger world. Clark goes there to help rebuild. At his job at DP, he gets the chance to interview visiting millionaire Bruce Wayne in Whatever City (not the actual name but a totally different city from Metropolis and Gotham). At the press meeting Bruce is rather cold & not as Clark expected. He's even working with Lex Luthor as part of a business deal, which makes Clark wary as he knows about Luthor's criminal activity.

Superman goes out in a flight to clear his head. While flying around he sees a kid walking on the railroad tracks hy himself with a pair of headphones....and a train steadily approaching! Supes swoops in and saves the kod from being nuked and chastises him for being so reckless. The teenager apologies and introduces himself as Jimmy Olsen (a nephew of the deceased James). He had been listening to music as a way to cope with his uncle's death. They talk for a while and Superman brings Jimmy back home. Several weeks later Clark ends up mentoring Jimmy as a school project.

Back in Whatever City we're introduced to one of Lex's assistants Nicola. She's a former Holliday Girl who had overheard Lex's plan and vowed to stop him. She managed to get in contact with an old friend: Diana Prince. Nicola brings up Lex's plan and hidden research of metahumans. The Amazon surmises that such a scheme could result in the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of people. Diana decides to bring her agency to stop him & asks Nicola to stay low. Diana gathers her old armor and prays to the Gods for luck.

Lex apparently likes Nicola enough to send her an invite to a charity ball, where she crosses paths with Bruce for the first time. They talk for a while only to be interrupted by Clark.

After a meeting with Luthor to discuss a merger with their companies, and seeing hints of Luthor's true selfishness, Bruce grows suspicious of him and started to dig around. We see through memorabilia that his initial coldness towards Clark and other people wasn't out of spite but of grief: Jason Todd's death some years ago.

Clark continues his good deeds and is slowly regaining his respect. He even makes plan to visit a children's hospital but is forced to cancel when Superman gets called to show up for a Congress hearing. At the meeting Superman admits his guilt but tells about James and how he died a hero. The Senator doesn't know where Superman is going with this but is listening. Then Superman's voice trails of as he hears a beeping noise and shocked he leaves the room in a hurry. He briefly searches the place and finds a bomb strapped in a closet. He carries the bomb out and throws it as high into the sky as possible Back inside the audience and senator are bewildered by his absence then hear a loud booming noise outside. There's shock as a bright light flashes in the sky...

Superman legit rejected their hearing to save them from a bomb. A bomb planted there by Tess on the instructions of Luthor...a plan she was willing to sacrifice her own life for.

This leaves the senator reconsidering her stance: if he really was as bad as people say then he wouldn't have saved them.

After the incident the entire country begins to have a more positive opinion of Superman while the government launches a search for possible terrorists. Bruce hears about what happened and after sneaking around as Batman, finds out about Luthor being the one responsible for the attempted terror attack. Later on he (as civilian) makes an announcement that he is not going to go through with the merger with LexCorp.

Hearing the news that Superman foiled his attempted assassination (and losing out on Wayne Enterprises), Lex gets very pissed off and threatens to fire Tess. She tries to save face by reminding Lex of his contingency plan...making Lex calm down and grin as he begins to remake his plan.

Nicola agrees to a date with Bruce and prepares. Meanwhile Lois and Jimmy are enjoying a night on the town while Clark stays behind to work on a news story. The two friends were about ti make it back to their hotel before being accosted by some men who force them into a car and takes them to Lex Corp.

At the HQ Lois calls him out that his plan could spell doom for the world. Surprisingly Luthor agrees but makes it clear he doesn't care. He orders his men to capture her, but Jimmy manages to escape and goes off to find Clark (who is writing a story to expose Luthor's actions). Jimmy tells him learns from him that Lois is in trouble Superman tells him to stay as he fetches the police. In reality he jas gone to find her as his hero alias. He finds her but just as he's about to rescue her Lex threatens that he also has another certain someone (Martha Kent ) captured if he doesn't comply, seeing that Supes was often seen visiting her. Reluctantly Superman complies and Lois is freed from her bonds, yet Lex takes them as hostages to a room lined with Green Kryptonite. He leaves to his warehouse to check on progress of his prototype. Jimmy wonders where Clark has gone and goes to the police station himself.

On their date Bruce mentions to Nicola that he knows what she's up to. Nicola coldly replies what was he talking about and he mentions Lex's actions and her possible status as an accomplice This starts a spat leading to Nicola spilling that she is working against Lex (making her a foil to the blindly loyal Tess) and that her goal was to stop Lex from unleashing his plan. She already called a friend to help them yet when Bruce presses forward they see a kid (Jimmy) wandering around and concerned asks what's wrong. Jimmy replies that his friend was kidnapped and doesn't know what to do. Bruce leaves to find Clark while Nicola stays with Jimmy.

Nicole & Jimmy arrives back at the hotel and sees Tess Mercer waiting for them. She had been sent by Luthor to eliminate the witness. Nicola tries to talk her coworker out of harming an innocent kid but Tess refuses. They duel but Tess proves to be a surprisingly stronger fighter. Before Tess could come in for the kill a frightened Jimmy knocks her out cold from behind.

At HQ Lois & a weakened Superman attempt an escape. Lois believes its hopeless but Clark reminds her that Lex won't put them down for long. Batman arrives at the HQ and stealthily avoids the guards. He deduces the room Lois and Supes are locked up in and free them. Batman says thay a little birdie told him everything Lois and Clark grinning that it's Jimmy and the two superheroes decide to work together to bring down Lex.

Batman goes to save Martha (the warehouse fight) while Superman goes to confront Lex, dropping Lois off at the hotel where rhe police are waiting (Tess apprehended). Nicola researcher offers to take the reporter home but she declines, not wanting to sit back and watch Lex try to destroy the world. After giving her report to the police she and Nicole meet Steven Trevor (a descendant of Steve Trevor and an agent). Steven says he already sent his men to arrest Lex as they found that he waa behind the bombing. Lois sneaks away to see if she can help Clark.

Clark manages to catch uo to Lex at his lab and tries to reason with him. Lex says that he already unleashed his prototype as a test to see how many lives Superman is able to save. Superman argues that Lex has gone mad trying to play god, which he disagrees: "I'm not playing god I'm only playing favorites is all." Disgusted, Superman leaves and goes off to fight the prototype. As he does an entire line of trucks arrive...led by Nicola's special friend...

Lex realizes he has been found out and tries to destroy the evidence. Lois realize that the monster was made of Kryptonian DNA so she looks around for the spare Kryptonite and manages to grab a considerable long piece. Just as she does the place starts flooding and she runs. However she nearly drown. Fortunately she gets pulled out by a woman wearing armor. Lois doesn't even ask her name as she recognizes the W shaped emblem and blue&red color scheme. Lois gives the heroine the spear and tells her that she says she loves Clark. Wonder Woman nods and heads towards the direction of Superman.

Superman draws the monster out away from the city and is helped by Batman. Wonder Woman arrives with the spear. The final battles commences with Batman providing a distraction to lead the prototype away. Diana and Superman fight the beast but is soon overpowered. Clark takes the makeshift spear and goes off and manages to subdue the creature rather unwilling to kill it. However he gets blown up by a missile sent by the US military and everyone thinks he is dead.

To his he walks out of the smoke, banged up but alive, having narrowly escaped the blast. The monster has died, leaving Clark to wonders sadly if the monster could have been saved as it had no control over its actions. A relieved Lois embraces him as the other two supers look on in bittersweet triumph.

Several days later, the President, on the behest of the Helen Hunt Senator, gives Superman a full pardon. The world also starts to see rising of actual superheroes to take in the increase of villains having been inspired by the actions of the newly dubbed Trinity. The ending shows that long term exposure to Kryptonite left Lex without any hair, cementing his iconic look. He had also beem arrested and tried and ends up locked up at a mental institution on an insanity plea. His other henchmen & Tess are jailed and Luthor's company scrambles to do damage control. Bruce catches up to Clark and apologizes for being cold. They part ways on better terms before musing at the similarities between their alter egos. Diana teases that they make a great team and returns to the capital with her team. Bruce returns to Gotham and stops at the cemetery to place flowers on Jason Todd's grave, showing that he moved to the acceptance stage of grief. Jimmy also ends up getting a job as an intern for Daily Planet with Lois as his mentor this time. And Nicola goes to Gotham to work as a social worker and takes up a case: Cassandra Cain.

The final scene ends with Clark as Superman dressed up in Metropolis visiting a local orphanage/foster home, showing that at his core he truly does care about humanity despite all them haters. 👏👏 👏 happy ending everyone!!!

The movie ends with a montage of

- Cyborg walking around aimlessly in his hometown and finding a discarded newspaper highlighting the heroes' exploits and getting the idea to try becoming a hero himself

- Aquaman in his kingdom catching up with the surface world and becoming curious, and wonders about an alliance

- Barry standing in a hill in his city in costume. He grins and smiles, before pulling over his cowl and racing off

- And Lex, plotting an escape from his cell, suddenly sees a peculiarly tall guard looming over him. He makes a digging comment that the guard shrugs off. To his surprise the guard unlocks the cell and leads Lex out. Lex asks who the guard is; the guard slips off his disguises revealing a sapient Gorilla...Gorilla Grodd!

All This sets up a future plot point that wouldn't be explored until after Justice League where we're introduced to the cinematic LEGION OF DOOM!!! The prototype they fight is not doomsday but foreshadows the creation of Bizarro (who was one of the original members of the LoD).

With the actual Justice League movie we continue with the formation of the team through several subplots converging into one major story arc. The Helen Hunt Senator plays a huge role being their ally and influence on building the Hall of Justice. Plus more Brucola stuff because we need fun stuff in Batman, Tom King.

[qqueenofhades]

Question for you. When you have time. And if you want. I know things are busy for you. What do you mean by end stage capitalism? Thanks.

Aha. I am sorry that this has been sitting in my inbox for a while, since I’ve been busy and doing stressful things and not sure how to answer this in a way that wouldn’t immediately turn into a pages-long rant. Nothing to do with you, of course, but just because I have 800 things to say on this topic, none of them complimentary, which I’ll try to condense down briefly. Ish.

In sum, end-stage capitalism is at the root of everything that’s wrong with the world today, more or less. It’s the state of being that exists when the economic system of capitalism, i.e. the exchange of money for goods and services, has become so runaway, so unregulated, so elevated to the level of unchallengeable dogma in the Western world (especially after the Cold War and decades of hysteria about the “scourge of communism”) and so embedded on every level of the social and political fabric that it is no longer sustainable but also can’t be destroyed without taking everything else down. Nobody wants to be the actual generation that lives through the fall of capitalism, because it’s going to be cataclysmic on every level, but also… we can’t go on like this. So that’s a fun paradox. The current world order is so drastically, unimaginably, ridiculously and wildly unequal, privileging the tiny elite of the ultra-rich over the rest of the planet, because of hypercapitalism. This really got going in the early 1980s when Ronald Reagan, still generally worshiped as a political hero on both the left and right sides of the American political establishment (even liberals tiptoe around criticizing Saint Ronnie), set into motion a program of slashing business and environment regulations, reducing or eliminating taxes on the super wealthy, and introducing the concept of “trickle-down” or “supply-side” economics. In short, the principle holds that if you make it as easy as possible for rich people to become EVEN MORE RICH, and remove all irksome regulations or restrictions on the Church of the Free Market, they will benevolently redistribute this largess to the little people. To say the very least, this….does not happen. Ever.

Since the 1980s, in short, we have had thirty years of unrestricted, runaway capitalism that eventually propelled us into the financial crisis of 2008, after multiple smaller crises, where the full extent of this philosophy became apparent…. and nobody really did anything about it. You can google statistics about how the price of everything has skyrocketed since about the 1970s, when you could put yourself through college on one part-time job, graduate with no student debt, and be assured of a job for the next 30 years, and how baby boomers (who are responsible for wrecking the economy) insist that millennials are “just lazy” or “killing [insert x industry]”. This is because we have NO GODDAMN MONEY, graduate thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt (if we can even afford college in the first place), are lucky if we find a job that pays us more than $10 an hour, and often have to string together several part-time and frangible jobs that offer absolutely nothing in the way of security, benefits, or long-term saving potential. This is why millennials at large don’t have kids, buy houses, or have any savings (or any of the traditional “adult” milestones). We just don’t have the money for it.

Even more, capitalism has taken over our mindsets to the point where it is, as I said, at the root of everything that’s wrong with the world. Climate change? Won’t be fixed because the ruling classes are making money from the current system, and if you really want to give yourself an aneurysm, google the profiteers who can’t wait for the environment/society to collapse because they’ll make MORE money off it. This is known as “disaster capitalism” and is what the US has done to other countries for decades. (I also recommend The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.) This obviously directly contributes to the War on Terror, the current global instability, the reason Dick Cheney, Halliburton, Blackwater, and other private-security contractors made a mint from blowing up Iraq and paying themselves to rebuild it, and then the resultant rise of al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other extremist reactionary groups. The bombing produces (often brown and Muslim) refugees and immigrants, Western countries won’t take them in, right-wing politicians make hay out of Threats To Our Way of Life ™, and the circle goes on. Gun control? Can’t happen because a) American white supremacy is too deeply tied to its paranoid right to have as many guns as it wants and to destroy the Other at any time, and b) the NRA pays senators by the gigabucks to make sure it doesn’t. (And we all know what an absolute goddamn CLUSTERFUCK the topic of big money and American politics is in the first place. It’s just… a nightmare in every direction.)

Meanwhile, end-stage capitalism has also systematically assigned value to society and to individuals depending entirely on their prospects for monetization. Someone who can’t work, or who doesn’t work the “right” job, is thus assigned less value as a human (see all the right-wing screaming about people who “don’t deserve” to have any kind of social and financial assistance or subsidized food and medicine if they won’t “help themselves”). This is how we get to situations where we have the ads that I kept seeing in London the other month: apps where you could share your leftover food, or rent out your own car, or collectively rent an apartment, or whatever else. Because apparently if you live in London in 2019, there is no expectation that you will be able to have your own food, car, or apartment. You have to crowdsource it. (See also: people having to beg strangers on the internet for money for food or medical bills, and strangers on the internet doing more to help that person than the whole system and/or the person’s employment or living situation.) There is nothing inherently wrong with capitalism as an economic theory. Exchanging money for goods and services is understandable and it works. But when it has run out of control to this degree, when the people who suffer the most under it fiercely defend it (see the working-class white people absolutely convinced that the reason for their problems is Those Damn Job Stealing Immigrants), when it only works for the interests of a few uber-privileged few and is actively killing everyone else… yeah.

Let’s put it this way. You will likely have heard of the two fatal crashes of Boeing 737 Max airplanes in recent months: the Lion Air crash in October 2018 and the Ethiopian Airlines crash in March 2019. Together, they killed 346 people. After these crashes, it turned out that the same malfunctioning system was responsible for both, and that Boeing had known of the problem before the Max went on the market. But because they needed to make (even more) money and compete with their rivals, Airbus, they had sent the planes ahead anyway, with unclear and confusing instruction to pilots about how to deal with it, and generally not acknowledging the problem and insisting (as they still do) that the plane was safe, even though it’s been grounded worldwide since March. There are also concerns that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is too deep in Boeing’s pocket to provide an impartial ruling (and America was the last country to ground the plane), and other countries’ aviation safety bodies have announced that they aren’t just going to take the FAA’s word for it whenever they decide that the Max is safe. This almost never happens, since usually international regulatory bodies, especially in aviation, will accept each other’s standards. But because of Boeing’s need for Even More Money, they put a plane on the market and into commercial passenger service that they knew had problems, and the FAA essentially let them do that and isn’t entirely trusted to ensure that they won’t do it again. Because…. value for the shareholders. Or something. This is the extreme example of what I mean when I say that end-stage capitalism is actively killing people.

It is also doing so on longer-term and more pernicious everyday levels. See above where people can’t afford their basic expenses even on several jobs, see the insulin price-gouging in the US (and the big pharma efforts in general to make drugs and healthcare as expensive as possible), see the way any kind of welfare or social assistance is framed as “lazy” or “bad” or “socialist,” see the way that people are basically only allowed to survive if they can pay for it, and the way that circle is becoming smaller and smaller. The American public is also fed enduring folk “wisdom” about “money doesn’t buy happiness,” the belief that poverty serves to build character or as an example of virtue, or so on, to make them feel proud of being poor/deprived/that they’re doing a good thing by actively supporting this system that is responsible for their own suffering. And yet for example, the Nordic countries (while obviously having other problems of their own) maintain the Scandinavian welfare model, which pays for college and healthcare, provides for individual stipends/basic income, allows generous leave for parenthood, emphasises a unionised workplace, and otherwise prescribes a mix of capitalism, social democracy, and social mobility. All the Nordic countries rank highly for human development, overall happiness, and other measurements of social success. But especially in America, any suggestion of “socialism” is treated like heresy, and unions are a dirty word. That is changing, but…slowly.

In short: the economic overlords have never done anything to give power, money, or anything at all to the working class without being repeatedly and explicitly forced, they have no good will or desire to treat the poor like humans (see: Amazon) or anything at all that doesn’t increase their already incomprehensible profit margins. The pursuit of more money that cannot possibly be spent in one human lifetime, that is accumulated, used to make laws for itself, and never paid in taxes to fund improvements or services for everyone else, lies at the root of pretty much every problem you can name in the world right now, is deeply, deeply evil, and I do not use that word lightly.

[fishoutofcamelot]

Zombie symbolism in media? Body snatchers? That sounds extremely interesting 👀👀👀

OOOOOOOOOOH ARE YOU READY FOR ME TO RANT? CUZ I’M GONNA RANT BABY. YALL WANNA SEE HOW HARD I CAN HYPERFIXATE???

I’ll leave my ramblings under the cut.

The Bodysnatchers thing is a bit quicker to explain so I’ll start with that. Basically, Invasion of the Body Snatchers was released in 1956, about a small town where the people are slowly but surely replaced and replicated by emotionless hivemind pod aliens. It was a pretty obvious metaphor for the red scare and America’s fear of the ‘growing threat of communism’ invading their society. A communist could look like anyone and be anyone, after all.

Naturally, the bodysnatcher concept got rebooted a few times - Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1978), Body Snatchers (1993), and The Invasion (2007), just off the top of my head. You’re all probably very familiar with the core concept: people are slowly being replaced by foreign duplicates. 

But while the monster has remained roughly the same, the theme has not. In earlier renditions, Bodysnatchers symbolized communism. But in later renditions, the narratives shifted to symbolize freedom of expression and individualism - that is, people’s ability to express and think for themselves being taken away. That’s because freedom of thought/individuality is a much more pressing threat on our minds in the current climate. Most people aren’t scared of communists anymore, but we are scared of having our free will taken away from us. 

The best indicator of the era in which a story is created is its villain. Stories written circa 9/11 have villains that are foreign, because foreign terrorism was a big fear in the early 2000s. In the past, villains were black people, because white people were racist (and still are, but more blatantly so in the past). 

Alright, now for the fun part.

ZOMBIES

Although the concept has existed in Haitian voodooism for ages, the first instance of zombies in western fiction was a book called The Magic Island written by William Seabrook in 1929. Basically ol Seabrook took a trip to Haiti and saw all the slaves acting tired and ‘brutish’ and, having learned about the voodoo ‘zombi’, believed the slaves were zombies, and thus put them in his book.

The first zombie story in film was actually an adaptation of Seabrook’s accounts, called White Zombie (1932). It was about a couple who takes a trip to Haiti, only for the woman to be turned into a zombie and enchanted into being a Haitian’s romantic slave. SUPER racist, if you couldn’t tell, but not only does it reflect the state of entertainment of the era - Dracula and Frankenstein had both been released around the same time - but it also reflects American cultural fears. That is, the fear of white people losing their authoritative control over the world. White fright.

Naturally, the box office success of White Zombie inspired a whole bunch of other remakes and spinoffs in the newly minted zombie genre, most of them taking a similar Haitian voodoo approach. Within a decade, zombies had grown from an obscure bit of Haitian lore to a fully integrated part of American pop culture. Movies, songs, books, cocktails, etc. 

But this was also a time for WWII to roll around and, much like the Bodysnatchers, zombie symbolism evolved to fit the times. Now zombies experienced a shift from white fright and ethnic spirituality to something a bit more secular. Now they were a product of foreign science created to perpetuate warmongering schemes. In King of Zombies (1941), a spy uses zombies to try and force a US Admiral to share his secrets. And Steve Sekely’s Revenge of the Zombies (1943) became the first instance of Nazi zombies. 

Then came the atom bomb, and once more zombie symbolism shifted to fears of radiation and communism. The most on-the-nose example of this is Creature With the Atom Brain (1955).

Then came the Vietnam War, and people started fearing an uncontrollable, unconscionable military. In Night of the Living Dead (1968), zombies were caused by radiation from a space probe, combining both nuclear and space-race motifs, as well as a harsh government that would cause you just as much problems as the zombies. One could argue that the zombies in the Living Dead series represent military soldiers, or more likely the military-industrial complex as a whole, which is presented as mindless in its pursuit of violence.

The Living Dead series also introduced a new mainstay to the genre: guns. Military stuff. Fighting. Battle. And that became a major milestone in the evolution of zombie representation in media. This was only exacerbated by the political climate of the time. In the latter half of the 20th century, there were a lot of wars. Vietnam, Korea, Arab Spring, Bay of Pigs, America’s various invasions and attacks on Middle Eastern nations, etc. Naturally the public were concerned by all this fighting, and the nature of zombie fiction very much evolved to match this.

But the late 1900s weren’t just a place of war. They were also a place of increasing economic disparity and inequal wealth distribution. In the 70s and 80s, the wage gap widened astronomically, while consumerism remained steadily on the rise. And so, zombies symbolized something else: late-stage capitalism. Specifically, capitalist consumption - mindless consumption. For example, in Dawn of the Dead (1978), zombies attack a mall, and with it the hedonistic lifestyles of the people taking refuge there. This iteration props up zombies as the consumers, and it is their mindless consumption that causes the fall of the very system they were overindulging in.

Then there was the AIDS scare, and the zombie threat evolved to match something that we can all vibe with here in the time of COVID: contagion. Now the zombie condition was something you could get infected with and turn into. In a video game called Resident Evil (1996), the main antagonist was a pharmaceutical company called the Umbrella Corporation that’s been experimenting with viruses and bio-warfare. In 28 Days Later (2002), viral apes escape a research lab and infect an unsuspecting public.

Nowadays, zombies are a means of expressing our contemporary fears of apocalypse. It’s no secret that the world has been on the brink for a while now, and everyone is waiting with bated breath for the other shoe to drop. Post-apocalypse zombie movies act as simultaneous male power fantasy, expression of contemporary cynicism, an expression of war sentiments, and a product of the zombie’s storied symbolic history. People are no longer able to trust the government, and in many ways people have a hard time trusting each other, and this manifests as an every-man-for-himself survivalist narrative. 

So why have zombies endured for so long, despite changing so much? Why are we so fascinated by them? Well, many say that it’s because zombies are a way for us to express our fears of apocalypse. Communism, radiation, contagion - these are all threats to the country’s wellbeing. Some might even say that zombies represent a threat to conversative America/white nationalism, what with the inclusion of voodooism, foreign entities, and late-stage capitalism being viewed as enemies.

Personally, I might partly agree with the conservative America thing, but I don’t think zombies exist to project our fears onto. That’s just how villains and monsters work in general. In fiction, the conflict’s stakes don’t hit home unless the villain is intimidating. The hero has to fight something scary for us to be invested in their struggles. But the definition of what makes something scary is different for every different generation and social group. Maybe that scary thing is foreign invaders, or illness, or losing a loved one, or a government takeover. As such, the stories of that era mold to fit the fears of that era. It’s why we see so many government conspiracy thrillers right now; it’s because we’re all afraid of the government and what it can do to us.

So if projecting societal fears onto the story’s villain is a commonplace practice, then what makes zombies so special? Why have they lasted so long and so prevalently? I would argue it’s because the concept of a zombie, at its core, plays at a long-standing American ideal: freedom.

Why did people migrate to the New World? Religious freedom. Why did we start the Revolutionary War and become our own country? Freedom from England’s authority. Why was the Civil War a thing? The south wanted freedom from the north - and in a remarkable display of irony, they wanted to use that freedom to oppress black people. Why are we so obsessed with capitalism? Economic freedom.

Look back at each symbolic iteration of the zombie. What’s the common thread? In the 20s/30s, it was about white fright. The fear that black people could rise up against them and take away their perceived ‘freedom’ (which was really just tyrannical authority, but whatever). During WWII, it was about foreign threats coming in and taking over our country. During Vietnam, it became about our military spinning out of control and hecking things up for the rest of us. In the 80s/90s, it was about capitalism turning us into mindless consumers. Then it was about plagues and hiveminds and the collapse of society as a whole, destroying everything we thought we knew and throwing our whole lives into disarray. In just about every symbolic iteration, freedom and power have been major elements under threat.

And even deeper than that, what is a zombie? It’s someone who, for whatever reason, is a mindlessly violent creature that cannot think beyond base animal impulses and a desire to consume flesh. You can no longer think for yourself. Everything that made you who you are is gone.

Becoming a zombie is the ultimate violation of someone’s personal freedom. And that terrifies Americans.

Although an interesting - and concerning - phenomenon is this new wave of wish fulfillment zombie-ism. You know, the gun-toting action movie hero who has the personality of soggy toast and a jaw so chiseled it could decapitate the undead. That violent survivalist notion of living off the grid and being a total badass all the while. It speaks to men who, for whatever reason, feel their masculinity and dominance is under threat. So they project their desires to compensate for their lack of masculine control onto zombie fiction, granting them personal freedom from obligations and expectations (and feminism) to live out their solo macho fantasies by engaging in low- to no-consequence combat. And in doing so, completely disregarding the fact that those same zombies were once people who cruelly had their freedom of self ripped away from them. Gaining their own freedom through the persecution of others (zombies). And if that doesn’t sum up the white conservative experience, I don’t know what does.

So yeah. That’s zombies, y’all.

Thanks for the ask!

[kemetic-dreams]

Nobody has a right of self-defense against this country [USA], even if it intervenes across the ocean to impose by force governments that the people of that country reject — Noam Chomsky

America rose to dominance post-WW2, post 9-11 it has again made another power surge to become an even stronger super power. More extended, more involved, more unapologetic about stepping on other nations sovereignty. The USA has an amazing knack for converting every global crisis into a stepping stone for its own interest; amazing efficient at exploiting regional conflicts. The U.S. has spent $1.3 trillion on the war on terror so far. That was in reaction to about 14,000 total deaths from so-called international terrorism from 1975 to 2003. That’s more than $90 million spent for each person killed. Right now, according to Robert Fisk, Western military presences inside the Islamic World is 22 times that than during the Crusades, yet the Western world expects zero response to this neocolonialism. [11] And what blinds reality and informs public opinion to demonize religion, in this case Islam, is only because Muslims do not to own Fox, CNN, BBC News, or even Western controlled Al-Jazeera (Al-CNN).

Forget the worldwide rampant Islamophobia and demonization of Arabs… Human Rights and Labor, has “institutionalized the fight against global anti-Semitism”, even though the US military and their allies have been destroying countries mostly populated by Muslims for over a decade. Or maybe is it precisely to support the war on Islam and the Arab World – a.k.a. “war on terrorism” – that the “war on global anti-Semitism” is being launched?–Julie Lévesque 

And again it is “religious” when people of Islamic heritage take up arms, for whatever reason (mainly defense), but non-religious when “Christian” nations “bomb them back into the stone ages.” How does that work? Why is the threshold of inclusion of a “religious act of violence” so open where Islam is concerned, and so closed when Europeans practicing Christianity is concern. If a Muslim sneezes in the wrong direction it is automatically an act of their Islamic faith. And why is spreading “Islamic Sharia” to Muslim countries so offensive, yet spreading capitalism and its carrying bag (sometimes going by the sobriquet democracy) so acceptable? Why is a “Jewish state” allowed but an “Islamic state” taboo? Has this democracy created any tangible benefits for oppressed people in South Africa, Israel, or even democracy’s own country of manufacture?

The only thing that can be seen as “Successful” in the world is a Western model. To beat out another path is vulgarly heterodoxical, and will be met with an absolute, and copious prejudicial use of force. Alternatives must not only fail, they must be made to fail visibly to deter being inspirational. And this is the backdrop to every major clash post WW2. Because as far as the Western control, they allow sell systems which they make so they can be manipulated (like their brand of Democracy).

Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it– Hitler

There is a global campaign from CNN (hawks) right down to Europe’s favorite African intellectuals (vultures) to push a myth by collating every instance which fingers “Islam and a problem” because “they hate our freedoms.” (freedoms or foreign policies? [Zogby]) If one compiles all the reports side by side the pattern is crystal clear; semi-fictional, hyperbole, dubious sources, to create a relationship to justify an agenda. This one-way moral mirror used to discuss “religion” never reflects on Western “secular” aggression with the same tone or supposed impartiality.

And it is identical to the way in which Africans are demonized in the West by constantly reporting statistics and occurrences, which they say prove the myth of a “Black problem.” But failing to mention the oppression African Americans have been victims of for the last 300 years. Why does it work? Because the general public are ignorant or misinformed about the dynamics and the overview of most of the world’s issues. Again reality seems to verify a casual relationship between African-Americans rape and others crimes.

The mass media become the authority at any given moment for what is true and what is false, what is reality and what is fantasy, what is important and what is trivial. There is no greater force in shaping the public mind; even brute force triumphs only by creating an accepting attitude toward the brutes –Ben Bagdikian (The Media Monopoly)

One thing should ring out in every situation, WHO DOES IT REALLY PROFIT. If America has a hand in anything, and they have their hand in everything, be 100% sure it profits America. Some rebels are good, some rebels are bad. History is replete testifies that what determines good rebels and bad rebels is American interest.

Why discuss anything without also factoring that Muslim countries control most of the world’s oil reserves? And Western powers have been hell bent on seeking justification for the taking of these assets under the guise of a “War on Terror.” And the omnipresent evil or nemesis of the “good White guys” is the omnipresent monolithic faceless “Islamist,” a neologism created by US foreign policy. It would be dishonest to label Western as Christian, or Israel as Judaism, just as it is dishonest to factor religion into a greedy neocolonial resource conflict. We also seem to forget the fact that of the top 10 deadliest conflicts on Earth none of them were religious in nature.

In the last 20 years of American history, there have been 129 confirmed White terrorist (Timothy Mcveigh, Robert Lewis Dear, to the Olympic Park Bomber, to the infamous Unabomber), all Christian, all white, all American, an all successful at killing people: However, has that fact ever factored in profiling White American Christians? Has it caused a backlash or the mythical association between Christianity, secularism or America and violence?“ Who from Anders Behring Breivik religion made a global apology? With the Rober Dear attacks blogger James Schlarmann chided “moderate white Christians” for not denouncing the Planned Parenthood attack as “moderate Muslims” are often asked to denounce Islamist terrorism.

And listen to the media “Oh he was stressed, he had a hard childhood”, I am sure Binny Boy was under a lot of stress also with all those Yankie troops prostituting his country. What about Michael Kadar, the Jewish lad who made hoax terrorist calls to Jewish organizations? Apparently his tumor made him do it.9) Less than a score of Arabs are accused of lone terrorist acts and now, because of that 0.0000000000001%, 1.5 billion people, 1/5 humans on the planet are on the FBI watch list. The one million dead Iraqi children somehow are “unworthy” causalities (Chomsky),that is not “religious aggression” by Western nations because it is sanitized by words such as indirect war, collateral damage and the cost of liberation.

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

Political Rant

The upcoming Iran War, it’s not about terrorism, it’s not about “Radical Islam,” it’s not about democracy.  It’s about oil, full stop, period, end of statement.

Not to resort to Soviet whataboutism, but every single critique labeled against Iran could just as easily be labeled against Saudi Arabia, and Republicans don’t care.  There’s a double standard here; the former is a rogue nation that must be stopped, while the latter is allowed to do whatever it wants because it’s more “western” than its neighbors.

Saudi Arabia is one of the only absolute monarchies left on the planet, and the US has no qualms against being chummy with them.  The Saudi royal family kills reporters and cuts people’s heads off and funds al-Qaeda, but they’re willing to sell us oil without going to war over it, so that makes it okay then.

Republicans create enemies for themselves to fight so they can always play the victim.

Dwight Eisenhower overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran and instated a monarchy; let me say that again, the United States got rid of a democracy to set up a monarchy.  The Shah of Iran, the king, was put in power by the US so that the Iranian people could no longer have a say over how they were governed.  Never believe the lie that the US fights for democracy overseas, they don’t give two shits about democracy, especially if that democracy is used to take power away from the US.

Ronald Reagan didn’t want the Soviets to establish a foothold in Afghanistan, so he funded a group calling themselves “the strugglers” (in Arabic “the Mujahideen”) to combat them.  This group would eventually start calling themselves “the students” (”Taliban”) and start fighting for “the foundation” (”al-Qaeda”).  On top of this, Reagan committed textbook treason with a capital T by selling weapons to Iran behind Congress’ back.  Reagan wanted to overthrow the left-wing government of Nicaragua by funding the Contras, a right-wing terrorist group.  Congress told him he couldn’t do that, but he decided to do it anyway; he wanted to give them money, but couldn’t use money Congress knew about, so he decided to sell weapons to raise the funds in secret.  Most courts shy away from using the t-word because it a VERY serious offense and refers to a very narrow set of charges.  Treason is specifically defined as going to war against the United States or helping its enemies; Iran was an enemy (the hostage crisis had JUST ended in 1981), so giving them weapons was actual genuine not-hyperbole treason.  He got away with it by shifting blame onto a patsy and having an intern shred the evidence (also by being Ronald Reagan; he was never held accountable for anything in his entire life, they nicknamed him the Teflon President)

George Bush the Elder got us involved in the Gulf, and George Bush the Younger continued this war on a lie.  Iraq didn’t have WMDs, it wasn’t responsible for 9/11, and had no ties to al-Qaeda; W just wanted to fix his family legacy by finishing what his daddy started, and Cheney wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein to make ungodly amounts of money from oil and military contracts.  War is profitable; “War is a Racket,” in the words of General Smedley Butler.

There are a few explanations for the Dangling Taint’s actions:

He’s distracting from impeachment.  Clinton did the same thing by bombing Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq and Yugoslavia.  Wag the dog, keep the eyes off the prize.

He’s trying to sway voters not to change horses midstream.  By doing something disastrous, he hopes people will think he knows what he’s doing and stick with him rather than let someone else inherit the mess.  “He started this, he must have some strategy, some end goal in mind.  He should be allowed to see it through, we shouldn’t throw a wrench in it and hand it off to someone else.”  He doesn’t have a strategy OR an end goal, he never did and never will, but his supporters think he does.

He’s being petty and trying to prove Obama wrong.  Obama stabilized relations with Iran, but Chump hates Obama for having the audacity to be black and powerful at the same time, and so vowed to undo everything Obama did to erase his legacy.  He’s obsessed with the man, he is pathologically incapable of letting it go and moving on with his life.  Everything he does has to be filtered through his insecure grade school rivalry; his main thought process is WWOD, then doing the exact opposite, regardless of if it’s in anyone’s best interest (his, Congress’s, the country’s, the world’s, it doesn’t matter; if Obama did it one way, he HAS to do it the other way.  He thinks that will prove a point.)

He’s trying to make even more money the way Cheney did; a few months ago he pulled troops from Syria, abandoning the Kurds, saying that he didn’t want the US to be involved in endless wars in the Middle East, that it wasn’t our fight anymore, that by pulling out he was succeeding where other president has failed, and now he’s doing this.  Is anyone really shocked that the man known for having no principles and doing the exact opposite of what he says he’ll do had no principles and did the exact opposite of what he said he’d do?

He’s doing it for attention. He’s incredibly insecure, he needs constant validation from his base of supporters 24/7 or he gets cranky because literally everyone else hates him and he isn’t emotionally mature enough to process this.  Insult any other president, and they ignore you; insult him, and he has to have the last word, no matter how childish it makes him look.  Starting a war means media coverage, the spotlight, a captive audience to drill his soundbites into.

The president doesn’t care how many Iranian people will die as a result of this, he doesn’t care about how many American citizens will be disenfranchised as a result, all he cares about is how it will help him.  He bought the last election with help from Russia, and now the government is looking into his finances to make sure he can’t buy this next one, so he’s trying to subvert that by playing dice with the world at stake.

[ruminativerabbi]

Sri Lanka, Paris

Passover and Easter are unrelated festivals that derive from different traditions, but that’s not how it seems to many in the Christian world. That most of the world calls Easter by a name related to Pesach (cf. French “Pâques” or Danish “Påske”) is part of it. As surely also is the assumption, widely believed yet almost definitely not historically correct, that the Last Supper described in the Gospels was a Passover seder or some version of a seder. (For an exhaustive consideration of every aspect of that issue, which apparently remains a delicate one even today in some circles, click here.) Even the use of the word “passion” to describe the suffering of Jesus provided some fuel for this particular fire, at least in antiquity, since the Greek word for “to suffer,” pascho, is phonically almost identical to Pascha, the name for Passover in the spoken Aramaic of ancient Jewish times.

Given the proximity of the festivals this year and in light of the above, I would like to write this week specifically about two events that have befallen the Christian world just recently and explain how they appear to someone reading the news through Jewish eyeglasses.

First, Sri Lanka. The numbers keep rising. First, “more than 100” dead, then “more than 200,” now, as I write on Wednesday, a minimal figure of 321—minimal in the sense that many of those hurt in the explosions—more than 500 in their own right—are not expected to survive and only haven’t succumbed to their wounds yet. It’s far away. It’s not a country Americans think of daily. No one on the radio, including the BBC World Service, seems to know whether the first word in the country’s name is pronounced “shree,” or “sree.”  (In all fairness to the Brits, when they seized the place and unilaterally made it part of their empire, they called it Ceylon, which name everybody knew how to pronounce.) And yet…the sense of familiarity and shared humanity that incidents like this bring in their terrible wake seemed to overwhelm the rest of the details. Most Americans, I’m sure, couldn’t even say easily what language they speak in Sri Lanka or what the capital city is, let alone whether a majority of the citizens are Buddhist, Hindu, or something else entirely. Indeed, it felt at first like a terribly bad thing that had happened to other people. But then, just as the extent of the carnage was becoming known came the even more startling detail that the attacks on the three churches and four hotels were apparently planned as a kind of response to the assault on the two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in the course of which fifty Muslim worshipers were murdered. And with that single detail everything changed.

The single ideational concept that justifies terrorism in the mind of the terrorist is the ultimate fungibility of human life. Since I’ve been dealing in SAT words these last few weeks, I’ll add another: fungibility is the principle according to which things are deemed solely to have ascribed, not intrinsic, value. Paper money is the easiest example to seize: if I lend you five dollars on Monday and you come back on Tuesday to return the five dollars to me, I can’t sue you in court because the five-dollar bill you returned to me is not the same five-dollar bill I lent to you. But this is not so because it would make no sense to borrow money you were not planning to spend. It’s true because money in our culture is deemed fully fungible and, as a result, the paper bills we use as currency are supposed to have as their sole value the sum they represent, the sum ascribed to them by law. As a result every single five-dollar bill is deemed the equivalent of every other one and you can’t complain if you deposit a fiver in the bank one day and then receive a different bill from the bank the next day when you show up to withdraw your money.

This principle also applies to the eggs you borrow from a neighbor or the cup of sugar, but ethical people would never apply it to human life. To justify terror, however, is to do exactly that and willingly to ignore the fact that none of those people in church on Easter morning in Sri Lanka was responsible for the massacre in New Zealand and thus to feel justified in opening fire because you consider Christians to be as fungible as five-dollar bills and the shooter in Christchurch was presumed at least in some sense to have been a Christian. And that underlying notion makes it a humanitarian issue, not a Sri Lankan one or even a Christian one. This perverse line of logic is not unknown to Americans and it is certainly not unknown to Israelis: when someone is irritated by some or another Israeli policy and chooses to express that pique by blowing up a discotheque despite the fact that none of the young people on the dance floor was responsible for the policy in question—that too is an example of treating human life fungibly.

As a result, attempting to wave away events like this weekend’s horror in Sri Lanka as nothing more than the violent crime of an insane person is to miss the point: if the government is right to consider credible the statement by the Islamic State’s Amaq News Agency tying the Sri Lankan bombings to the shooting in Christchurch, then the principled effort to eradicate terrorist groups and to banish their nation-state sponsors from the forum of nations is not only a practical response, but a deeply moral one. There are, of course, crazy people in the world who do crazy things. We Americans have had lots of examples of that in these last several decades! But terror is not craziness at all: by resting on the ideational foundation that considers all human life truly to be fungible and thus devoid of intrinsic value, terrorism comes to represent the ultimate devaluation of God’s greatest gift. As we approach the end of Passover and prepare to commemorate the destruction of Pharaoh’s armies in the sea, we should all take a moment to reflect on a deep, if unsettling, scriptural truth: violence undertaken to dominate or to oppress is wrong and fully sinful, but acting forcefully to combat evil is both ethically justifiable and, speaking morally, wholly right. Americans know this. Israelis certainly know it and so do New Zealanders. And now Sri Lankans have had the same lesson brutally brought to their own doorstep.

I brought a whole different set of emotions to my contemplation of the fire that destroyed such a significant part of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. It is, arguably, one of the most stunning pieces of Gothic architecture in the world and is surely one of the world’s truly great cathedrals. It took a hundred years to build. (Work was undertaken in 1160, but the project only drew to its conclusion a full century later in 1260.) There’s no reason for that specific detail to confound—work on St. John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue began in 1892 and the project still isn’t anywhere near finished—yet it somehow feels challenging nevertheless to think of a project spanning that much time and involving that many people. And all of it happening so long ago, and in an age without power tools, bulldozers, or electricity! For Jewish onlookers, on the other hand, the cathedral shimmers in a slightly different light.

For the Jews of France, the twelfth century was a terrible time. When work on the cathedral was still in its third decade, King Philip II expelled the Jews of France from his territory, apparently without the slightest interest in knowing or caring where they went once they left. When work on the cathedral was about halfway done, a council convened by Pope Innocent III—called the Third Lateran Council because it met at Rome’s Lateran Palace—disqualified Jews across Europe from holding public office, required Jews (and Muslims too) to wear distinctive dress so that they could not be mistaken in the street for Christians, and banned Jews from almost every profitable profession except pawnbroking and the sale of old clothes. But it wasn’t solely their economic lives that were under attack, but their intellectual lives as well: on March 3, 1240, when Notre Dame was a mere twenty years away from completion, church officials burst into synagogues across France—March 3 was a Shabbat in 1240—and carted off entire Jewish libraries. Eventually the king of France, Louis IX—who is recognized as a saint both in the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, and who is the St. Louis after whom the city in Missouri is named—insisted that the Talmud itself be put on trial. The ancient work was defended by a quartet of able rabbis, but the verdict was a foregone conclusion and then, on a day that lives on in infamy as one of the pre-Shoah world’s most outrageous acts of violent anti-Semitism, twenty-four cartloads of books—some 10,000 volumes, including irreplaceable works that would be considered of inestimable value today—all twenty-four cartloads of books were burnt in public on the Place de Grève, now called the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville, just across the river from…Notre Dame de Paris.

Notre Dame itself features one of the most hateful of all anti-Semitic symbols on its front façade, where are depicted Synagoga and Ecclesia (“Church”) as a pair of very different women, the one (Synagoga, of course) dressed in rags, a snake covering her eyes, a broken scepter in her hand, and the tablets of the law slipping from her grasp, and the other, Ecclesia, depicted as a proud, attractive woman standing fully erect while carrying a wine chalice in one hand and a staff with a cross at its top in the other. The insult couldn’t be more clearly put. Nor has it lost its punch over the centuries: even though the statues were destroyed during the Revolution, they were both were restored and replaced during the nineteenth century. They’re still there too, inviting any eagle-eyed visitor to learn the lesson they were set in place to teach: that Judaism is defunct, dead, and disgraced, whereas Christianity is triumphantly and gloriously dominant.

So when I look at Notre Dame and feel the same pang of regret all civilized people surely do when a world-class work of architecture is damaged, I also recall the world that gave birth to Notre Dame and its harshness, its cruelty, its violence and its deeply engrained prejudice against Jews and against Judaism. And I think of poor Synagoga as well, and wonder what she would have to say if she were somehow able to shove the serpent aside and open her stony eyes onto the world. Would the fact that she’s still on display all these centuries later surprise her? And what would she have to say to the thirteen million visitors who walk by her on their way into France’s most famous cathedral? Would the resurgence of anti-Semitism in France surprise her? Would the existence of an independent Israel? Would anything? Those are the questions that the fire at Notre Dame prompts me to ponder on these coming final days of Pesach. 

[lmadigan-blog]

The Women White Feminism Doesn’t See

Just last weekend, Ellen Degeneres was seen with none other than former President George W. Bush at a football game, something that got her absolutely dragged through the mud by the true kings, queens, and non-binary sovereigns of Twitter— Gen-X leftists who turn off their auto-capitalization function for the full aesthetic experience. A few days later, Ellen talked about it on her show, where she gave the same little sad talk every rich, white, privileged person gives when they feel bad about themselves— “come on guys, why can’t we all just be friends? when did that become such a bad thing, guys, huh? when did it stop being ok to hang out with people who have different opinions? ” The resulting controversy dragged in various celebrities like Mark Ruffalo and Reese Witherspoon, as well as politicians like Tulsi Gabbard, leading to an assorted collection of big names and verified Twitter accounts drawing lines in the sand and hastily choosing sides.

Now, the ensuing clusterfuck of Twitter discourse did two things: 

1. Allow me, someone too young to remember the Iraq War/Abu Ghraib discourse, to get an up-close, real-time reenactment of all the defenses of George Bush and U.S. imperialism (well, is waterboarding really torture if it doesn’t leave any physical scars?)

2. Reveal a perfect example of how Western feminism centers white womanhood and American identities over the literal lives and human rights of those living beyond our borders.

As much fun as it would be to describe all the mental gymnastics and moral leaps and bounds people took to defend literal war crimes, I’m not here to write about that. What I will say is this— our first concepts of what “feminism” looks like or what a “feminist” looks like is very institutionalized, very capitalist, and very white. The feminist in America’s eye is Hillary Clinton, is Ellen, is a pussy-hat wearing, sign-wielding, white woman. It’s the daring white woman strong enough to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, it’s the daring white woman brave enough to advocate for her right to serve in active combat overseas, it’s the daring white woman steadfast enough to be a police officer to serve her own community. 

In other words, when we center white women in positions of authority as a model for “feminism”, it shouldn’t be any surprise that mainstream feminist discussions are based around whether women should be allowed to murder people of color overseas just like men are, or whether we should let a white woman join a long line of white men bombing the hell out of whichever poor Middle Eastern or Latin American country decides to think about wanting human rights again. This model of American feminism doesn’t just uplift white women, though— it marginalizes women of color, trans women, queer women, working-class women, and women in the Global South. When specifically looking at women of color and women in the Global South, this form of capitalist, imperialist feminism not only pushes such groups to the margins of society, but also fetishizes them, exotifies them, builds up this elaborate, white supremacist fantasy in which these poor, suppressed, ignorant women need to be liberated from their oppressor, or in other words, their own cultures and communities. This mentality, something scholar and feminist theorist Gayatri Spivak describes as a “very old civilizing logic of white men and white women saving brown women from brown men”, is a logic used to justify war crimes across the globe. Laura Bush called the “War on Terror” a “fight for the dignity and rights of women”. This “fight for the dignity and rights of women” has resulted in 2.4 million deaths. Just a few weeks ago, Condoleezza Rice argued against pulling U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, in the name of not abandoning the “women of Afghanistan”. Yes, in 2019, the year of our Lord, two-thousand and nineteen, after all that has been done in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and other nations in the name of fighting terrorism.

Whether it’s Condoleezza Rice or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or Justin Trudeau, basically any and all political leaders of the West (who are self-proclaimed feminists) will be practicers of this white feminism, whether it’s through overthrowing the government of Honduras and plunging the country into widespread violence, chaos, and poverty, pushing for mass human rights abuses and state-sponsored violence in the Middle East, dropping over 26,000 bombs in the Middle East in one year, or selling arms to Saudi Arabia and Israel while simultaneously buying a pipeline to override Indigenous voices. Why? Because this very concept of “saving” women of color is rooted in white saviorism, something deeply ingrained in the political and philosophical landscapes of the West. Our very concepts of “women’s issues” are distorted, and as a result, who we designate the heroes of these causes become distorted too. Are issues of drone strikes, concentration camps, and mass bombing not women’s issues too? Or are women’s issues solely limited to representation in film and equal pay for a soccer team, problems that can be easily championed by the performative, pussy-hat activist?

As a result, the question of white perceptions of women of color ultimately becomes a question of how to recalibrate our focus of what’s at stake here. How to understand visceral issues that many women living outside (and within) the borders of the United States grapple with every day, and seeing them from a lens that isn’t confined by white saviorism. And the only way this can be achieved is to center women who are further marginalized beyond just gender, some sort of feminism born from below.

There’s a short story called “The Women Men Don’t See” written by James Tiptree Jr., which basically tells the story of two women, a mother and a daughter, stranded on a mangrove swamp with a white man named Don Fenton, and a Mayan pilot named “Captain Esteban”. The story follows Fenton and his frustration as the two women seem to fail to fit into his preconceived notions of female stereotypes. As the story progresses, it becomes evident that the only time the women are even really noticed by Fenton is when they’re sexualized— hence the title. It ends with a shocking turn of events, as the two women are voluntarily spirited away by aliens from another planet, deciding that any life could be better than the life of a woman on earth. While hailed as a brilliant piece of feminist literature (and in many ways, it is), the piece is also a perfect example of how white, American women are oftentimes centered in these discussions of gender discrimination. Either by design or hilarious irony, the story is set in Quintana Roo, and Ruth Parsons, perhaps the only female character with relevant dialogue, works for the “Foreign Procurement Archives” based in Washington, D.C. Even within this short story, the same American, imperialist form of feminism is found. A white woman who literally works for the State Department and helps manipulate currencies and commodities of countries in the Global South is suddenly swept from all the horror and discrimination by kind-hearted aliens?

All of this, from Clinton to Tiptree Jr., from Iraq to the mangrove swamp, isn’t meant to be a critique of white women— I would say, as most people with a moral compass would, that it is a good thing when all women are generally interested in the collective liberation of all underprivileged minorities. What I am saying, however, is that the proper navigation of differences between communities and identities can build solidarity, and through solidarity, true liberation can be achieved. In Audre Lorde’s The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, she argues that difference has been always presented as either something to be ignored, or something to be used as a wedge to weaken the cause. As she puts it, those who are outside the “acceptable” definition of women— low-income, queer, Black, non-American, have a far better understanding of the fight for survival and victory, know that by “learning how to take our differences and make them strengths”, liberation will be achieved. This is what I mean when I say “feminism from below”. This is not Hillary Clinton’s feminism, this is not Ellen’s feminism, and it certainly isn’t America’s feminism. It’s the feminism of those that white America doesn’t see. Erasure, centering white womanhood, imperialist and American feminism— these are all the master’s tools, and they will never bring about true liberation.

[amin58fidele]

Abdel Bari Atwan :

We waited for the war in the Straits of Hormuz and Pompeo suddenly transported it to Iraq. Is there a massacre waiting for six thousand American troops by the "popular crowd" and its missiles? Why do we think that Trump lost this war early and fired a single shot?

It is difficult for us, and perhaps many observers like us, to pursue the fronts of potential tension in light of the escalating military buildup between Iran and the United States, after sending the aircraft carrier Lincoln, and the destruction of four giant oil tankers in the port of Fujairah UAE, and an attack by seven Huthi aircraft "March" The Iraqi front is on the line, and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, one of the hawks who drums drums of war against Tehran, flew to Baghdad carrying "silos" containing pictures showing that the "popular crowd" To set up a missile network near the US bases on the Syrian border in preparation for the strike.

We waited for the supposed confrontation in the Straits of Hormuz, and Pompeo tells us, and to Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, that the danger to the United States, its interests and its forces lies in Iraq (600,000 troops) and carries two messages at the same time. , Will respond to any attack on its forces strongly and without reference to the Iraqi government, and the second offer to Iran to negotiate.

***

The US administration withdrew most of its embassy staff in Baghdad in anticipation of attacks, and asked its citizens not to travel to the Iraqi capital, confirming that it had received information that there were dangers posed by Iran threatening its interests, just as it did the same when its embassy was hit in the largest green zone in the world. Basra rocket attack in September, the first one, and the second was closed for fear and fear.

America sent more than 300 thousand troops to Iraq to occupy, and lost 7 trillion dollars and three thousand soldiers from this aggression, which was based on falsehoods and false information, yet the Minister of Foreign Affairs, or its president, can not visit this country in broad daylight, and infiltrate it Such as terrified cats, how would it be if Iran attacked the continent with a population of more than 80 million, unexploded missile forests, and perhaps primitive nuclear bombs?

We do not know the validity of this dangerous American information carried by Pompeo to the Iraqi leadership, but what we know is two things. First, Mr. Abdul Mahdi can not protect American forces, or "curtail" any action that the popular factions can do against him because he does not have the authority , Or the ability in this field, and Pompeo went to the wrong address, these factions, which have a force of 150 thousand, and equipped with heavy equipment, is stronger than the Iraqi army itself, and second, that Pompeo's information about the risk of these factions on US interests did not convince anyone In that alliance In Europe, General Chris Gekke, spokesman for the International Coalition in Iraq and Syria, confirmed yesterday that "the level of threat posed by these pro-Iranian factions against US forces has not escalated." In other words, he says to Pompeo: "You are a liar."

President Trump, who has sent aircraft carriers, ships and giant bombers to the Gulf to terrorize the Iranians has so far been a paranoid who does not know where he will come from and his dangerous forces. More importantly, he no longer talks about the second phase of the sanctions imposed on Tehran, zero zero oil exports, And sent mediators to seek a negotiated solution.

Trump said that he will respond strongly to any aggression against America and the interests of its allies in the region, and here are the allies are under attack in two days, the first in Fujairah UAE, and the second, in the provinces of Daoudip and Afif Saudi, but did not respond and sends his foreign minister to Iraq to secure the lives of his forces, And his election chances for a second presidential term, because the killing of one US soldier in Iraq means the collapse of his ambitions in this regard.

All the European countries have distanced themselves from this American mobilization for the war against Iran. President Trump has not succeeded in convincing one country to withdraw from the Iranian nuclear agreement. If he decides to go to war, he will find only the Israeli occupation state, the Sunni Arabs of NATO, who are they.

***

Trump, and a quick follow-up to the developments of the crisis, come out of this confrontation defeated and lost credibility, without firing a single shot, the military mobilization did not intimidate Iran, which will weaken his positions and his allies, especially if the crisis ended negotiations.

No one wants the war in the Middle East, except for the trio of Pompeo, Bolton and Netanyahu who instigate it, and any American mistake will make the Trump administration and the United States in general pay a heavy price, materially and humanly, and realize that one US soldier from Iraq and Syria will not return to his country. ... Not to mention those who are stationed on ships and aircraft carriers. We are not talking here about the Gulf allies who will participate in this war, or will be its field.

[queendom25]

Grand Old Pudency

    Well if it isn’t the consequences of our actions come back to haunt us in the form of a coup d'état. I remember writing about a certain pernicious party back in February regarding their hand in high treason in the 80s and acquitting former President Trump. There are many things I disagree with libertarians on issues in favor of capitalism but for once, I agree with Spike Cohen’s statement on the recent events in Afghanistan. He mentioned on Twitter, “Thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of Afghan lives, trillions of dollars. All for nothing but the lined pockets of bankers and weapons contractors. End all of the wars, and bring all of the troops home.” Southern Oregon I want to point out that local republicans don’t see the irony in being against the Taliban when they both have similarities in faith and violent extremism. This is the perfect time to discuss the lack of accountability in military spending, toxic belief in a singular faith being taught in schools, and white nationalism as the influence in history books.

    According to Brown University, the United States has managed to spend $822bn between 2001 and 2019, not including the base in Pakistan used for Afghan-related activity. If I could describe my thoughts about the U.S. military, I would say that I am pro-veteran and anti-military because of my time working at the Department of Veterans Affairs in White City, OR. I asked one veteran why he joined the military in the first place and he said because he was homeless. That conversation led me to believe that his story among many others here in the United States involves exploitation as the main reason for joining the military, not because they were feeling particularly patriotic. What if instead of spending hundreds of billions of dollars on sending troops overseas, we used that money on ending homelessness nationally? Instead of spending trillions of dollars to line the pockets of weapons contractors, we make college accessible to all U.S. citizens? Ok, now I’m finished with my soapbox speech for the time being so now let’s observe what Governor Brown’s response to the Afghanistan crisis is. Kate Brown stated in a letter, “As we watch the current situation unfold in Afghanistan, Oregon stands ready to help the federal government resettle Afghan refugee families…” but something about her statement doesn’t sit right with me. Here in Southern Oregon, our local government encourages inhumane sweeps of homeless people and continuously fund high barrier shelters! In this state, republicans associate terrorism with the Black Lives Matter movement and justify their islamophobia because of 9/11. They never mention that thanks to Reagan, Scott Weekly, and James Gritz trained the mujahideen which led to the attack in the first place! I remember seeing a news article about Eric Osterberg who experienced a literal hate crime at a Klamath Falls council meeting not too long ago. Instead of addressing the racism and homophobia that exists here in Oregon, the comments on social media were using Islam as a scapegoat for their bigotry. This is the knee-jerk reaction when Christianity is critiqued for hate crimes committed in the name of the faith. My concern is why the Governor has failed to address the actual climate here in Oregon and chose to paint this false picture of inclusivity. We can’t ignore the islamophobic tension that will increase the moment that Afghan refugees touch American soil so let’s talk about the elephant in the room-white supremacy.

    I’m sure by now everyone has heard about yet another threat in D.C. but this time it wasn’t a mass gathering of Trumpers, just a lone bomb threat with some GOP sympathy from Rep. Mo Brooks. Floyd Roseberry told law enforcement he had a bomb in his truck which resulted in immediate evacuations of buildings near the Library of Congress. There were no viable explosives but according to this man’s live stream, he was very anti-immigration and pro-Afghanistan airstrikes as part of his list of demands. Because he also demanded Biden’s resignation, we can all assume he was on the Trumper bandwagon. There have been some memes going around on social media insinuating that the Taliban equates to the insurrectionists on Jan. 6th. The Trumper terrorists had help from those that currently hold public office and they had merchandise indicating when they would be attacking the capitol. There was no clear plan of action when they stormed the capitol in the first place and one of them was wearing buffalo horns! The Taliban on the other hand seized control of the government and demanded state governors to release political prisoners previously arrested by the Afghan National Security force. When the U.S, forces withdrew from Afghanistan, former President Ashraf Ghani fled to the United Arab Emirates to ensure a safe transition of power to the Taliban. The Trumper terrorists couldn’t handle a mask mandate let alone public policy so these two groups are different in that regard but their ideas are similar. Trumpers want Christianity to be the center of legislation, the curriculum they want to be taught in schools is similar to what’s going on in Texas, and to overturn Roe v. Wade. Between residential schools that natives were forced to go to and forced sterilization imposed on welfare recipients in this country’s history, when have we ever been a safe space for women’s rights?

 Governor Brown’s written statement on accepting refugees is inclusivity that was never the foundation of this country. Hatred for women and people of color is woven into its design but state representatives are trying to shield that truth from the public curriculum. Their actions lead me to believe that those in power have no interest in changing the system that oppresses us so who are we to look down on the Taliban when we won’t address our flaws.

Sources:

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/taliban-key-facts-islamic-militant-group-2021-08-15/ 

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-47391821 

https://www.kdrv.com/content/news/Gov-Brown-state-lawmakers-say-Afghan-refugees-are-welcome-in-Oregon-575124031.html 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/us/politics/domestic-terror-white-supremacists.html 

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/capitol-police-investigating-bomb-threat-near-library-congress-n1277159 

https://www.kdrv.com/content/news/575124532.html 

https://twitter.com/RealSpikeCohen/status/1426906012339085312 

[stephendavid]

[I posted some of this in the Comments section but YouTube censored and deleted it, clearly for political reasons] This video contains a Sky News Australia interview with Bush (W/Jr) advisor Michael Duran. What is truly amazing is that Sky News presents itself as a "Conservative" outlet, but this is from it. I have been an enthusiastic follower, esp. of Alan Jones, for sometime. But in this segment with a Neo-Con RINO, no one on the panel questions any of the lies and foolishness this ignorant clown says. His basic premise is : diverse Muslim groups hate each other more than they hate us. The 9/11 and other terrorist attacks weren't really aimed at us. They were meant to trick us into fighting and causing instability in Muslim countries so they could take advantage of it to destroy their Muslim enemies. (you know, the 'Moderate Muslims" Bush constantly reminded us about. I supported Bush after 9/11 because he did a good job of temporarily uniting us and getting us through the national trauma. He also launched the attack on Afghsnistan in order to destroy Al-Qaida and their training camps. But it quickly became problematic when he labeled it a "War on Terror". As was mentioned frequently, you can fight a physical enemy with (physical) armed forces but you cannot fight and defeat a tactic (terror) with missiles and warplanes. To make matters worse, you can't defeat an enemy if you choose to be willfully ignorant of who they are, what their ideology is, their motivation, and why they want to destroy you. 20 years and countless Islamic terror attacks later, and Bush advisor Duran is still promoting nonsense demonstrating this willful ignorance. Bush almost immediately went on a campaign of endlessly promoting the lie that "Islam is a religion of peace." After every Islamic terrorist attack around the world, we were told this. Keep in mind that, no other religion has been given that label which needs to be reaffirmed on a regular basis, year after year, when various adherents carry out murders, executions, beheadings, knife attacks and bombings around the globe. No one has to remind us that other religions are "Religions of Peace" because it's rare that any of their adherents carry out such attacks. And of course, because they were so enchanted by their own lies about the vague and undefined "enemy", Bush and his advisors, such as numbnutz Duran, refused to study the enemy's ideology - Islam. it was much easier to lie than study the actual 1400 years of doctrines and motivations that launched a 7th century bandit and warlord to take the middle east by the sword and convert, subject (dhimmihood) or execute all who fell within their power. When I was a teenager in the 1960s, I launched a study of world religions that included the important and Primary texts of those religions. That included the Bhagavid Gita, the I Ching, the Tao Te Ching, teachings of Buddha, Zen masters, Yogis, writings of Milarepa (Tibetan) etc. I also read the Qur'an completely. However, unlike other texts, I read it once and tossed it. Whatever was somewhat "good" in it was derived from Jewish and Christian Scripture. But even that was just commentary aimed at changing the meaning or narrative of the original text. And other than that the Qur'an is filled with hatred and violence - aimed specifically at Christian, Jews and pagans. As I was an extreme passivist at the time, I abhorred the foul book. Since 9/11, I have purchased a number of different translations, along with reading the Sira (Muslim biography of Muhammad), and regularly consult Muslim websites to access the large collections of hadiths/Sunnah which preserve the sayings and deeds of Muhammad. Muslim apologists cherry pick verses from Qur'an to support their false claims, but the vast body of Islamic texts make it clear that Islam is the religion of War, Hatred and Terror. It started that way with Muhammad, and it continues over 1400 years later. So the idea that we could attack Al-Qaida and the Taliban and install democracy where the people's own religion did not support democracy and human rights, was simply a fool's errand from the beginning. Following WW2, the US and Allies performed an extensive "de-Nazification" process to remove as much of Nazi ideology from society as possible to support the new Democratic nation. And prior to the Nazis, Germany had been a Christian country. A study of German church history reveals that it had become spiritually weak and the average German had little interest in it (attendance had become drastically low), which facilitated the rise of fascism. But the society historically had the foundations of Christianity to support democracy and human rights following WW2. Numerous global studies/surveys taken among Muslims since 9/11 demonstrate that, while most Muslims don't want to risk their lives in terrorist attacks, many are OK with financially supporting extremist groups (e.g. see the Holy Land Foundation Hamas terrorist financing trial conviction, 2009) and the vast majority of Muslims around the world support Shariah, including draconian laws oppressing women, homosexuality and religious minorities. The only countries where such Shariah support was low were in countries that had been heavily influenced by western democracies, such as Lebanon (originally Christian), Turkey (formed under secularist Attaturk) and Indonesia (former Dutch colony, multi-ethnic with 15% non-Muslim population). While the occupying coalition claimed to be installing democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, they allowed inclusion of clauses in both constitutions that disallowed any law to be passed that conflicted with Shariah - the actual basic foundation behind Islamic terrorism in the first place. As a result, blasphemy and apostasy laws were put in place with capital punishment. These laws were aimed and misused against religious minorities (Hindus & Christians) and there have been occasions where individuals had to be removed from Afghanistan to save their lives. And that is what is happening on a wide scale now that Biden has suddenly removed their military protection and the Taliban has returned. As long as we pumped endless supplies of cash along with a military presence, while propping up a modern infrastructure the Afghan government failed to maintain, they would reap the benefits of the artificial democracy non-Muslims foisted on it. But as soon as the non-Muslim cash and military were removed, it took literally no time for the entire system to implode. Our original goal should not have been the fool's errand of democracy implementation, which was an impossible task, given the situation described above. The goal should have simply been to remove the fangs (Al-Qaeda) of the tiger (Taliban/Afghan govt). That meant to destroy/weaken Al-Qaeda, destroying their training camps and completely burn down and destroy the Opium Poppy fields that financed the terrorists through heroin sales to the Cartels and ended up pumped into the arms of Americans. This is one serious thing our military did little to nothing about. A big deal was made over finding Osama Bin Laden, but he was never located by our military in Afghanistan. He was eventually located via surveillance and Intelligence years later living peacefully in our duplicitous "ally" Pakistan, and taken out by Special Ops -- not by Afganistan occupation. The bottom line is that we should have bombed Afghanistan until they had no ability to continue their terror attacks and then left. At most, one could argue in favor of building and maintaining a military base on location (E.g. Gitmo) for rapid response if/when Al-Qaeda began to rebuild. But we should not have wasted 20 years of money, resources and lives propping up a fragile government that could never exist without us. We obviously should have left along time ago. But, although I have not been a Trump supporter for personality reasons, it's clear that he was the only one who could have extracted us without causing the totally chaotic mess that our current feeble and demented President created almost overnight -- all the while hiding "on vacation" in Camp David and Delaware. Trump's agreement with the Taliban was that we would systematically withdraw by May if they agreed to not attack our forces. By even Biden's admission, the Taliban lived up to their agreement. But Biden took over in January and by April had announced that he was going to reneg ion the agreement and keep our military presence in Afganistan with the goal of leaving by the anniversary of 9/11. It appears obvious that he did this as some kind of foolish symbolic gesture (we retreat by the anniversary of their attack???). But that was a serious breech of Trump's agreement, making it null and void. And every expert, as well as basic common sense, said we should have pulled all US and coalition civilians out furst,first, followed by any Afghans who provided support (translators, etc) or otherwise would be specific Al-Qaeda targets. Following successful evacuation of civilians, we absolutely should have removed all the millions of dollars worth of sophisticated US military weapons and hardware, such as drones, tracking devices, night vision goggles, etc. Our military should have been the very last to be evacuated. But that did not happen because a feeble bodied and feeble minded withering old man was put in charge as US Commander-and-Chief and Leader of the Free World. How do we put ourselves back together and return the US to the prominent center of the world stage as a "Superpower" that we held just a mere half year ago? The world and the US are radically different then they were even a few short weeks ago. Congress needs to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove Biden from office for medical (cognitive) reasons. But that would mean elevating Kamala Harris to the highest office -- something NO ONE wants, Keep in mind that Harris was polling in last place in the single digits before being the first Dem to drop out following the DNC debate. In fact, it was totally shocking when Biden's handlers chose her to take the number 2 slot, given the way she had eviscerated Biden -- outright implying he was a racist and siding with his accuser regarding sexual assault charges. But since taking over as Vice President, she has done literally nothing. She was put in charge of the Southern Border crisis, yet ignored the situation and routinely refused to personally visit the Border. When the problem became catastrophic, she was finally pressured into action, but instead of visiting the Southeastern points where the crisis was at a peak, she flew down for a photo-op in the Northeast area of the Border -- literally hundreds of miles from the crisis. And she has been silent and mimicking her boss by hiding away during the current fiasco in Afghanistan. Whenever confronted with a difficult or embarrassing question, she routinely throws her head back and laughs -- Kackling until the questioner gives up and moves to the next topic. She would not be any serious improvement on Biden, which is probably why the Dems are afraid to remove him. aAll we can hope for is the near guarantee that the Republicans take both Houses in 2022. We'll have to wait and see.

[arcticdementor]

Members of the political class are buying into burgeoning fantasies about a second civil war, indulging visions about sparring with parts of their own subject populations. In the wake of recent conflicts culminating in the Capitol riot, prominent figures have been extrapolating from our violent polarization to a dystopian future of insurgency within our borders. Officialdom seems dead set on fanning the sparks of existing political strife into something resembling a national house fire.

"The challenge facing us now is one of counterinsurgency," Robert Grenier, former CIA station chief for Pakistan and Afghanistan and later director of the CIA Counterterrorism Center, insists in The New York Times. "Though one may recoil at the thought, it provides the most useful template for action."

The danger, Grenier adds, lies in "a large, religiously conservative segment of the population, disproportionately (though not entirely) rural and culturally marginalized." He doesn't believe that the entire segment is violent, but it constitutes "a mass of citizens—sullen, angry and nursing their grudges—among whom the truly violent minority will be able to live undetectably, attracting new adherents to their cause."

…

While neither Grenier nor Brennan are currently in government, both are well-connected and influential. Tellingly, the same day that Grenier's Times screed appeared, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a terrorism bulletin that read like a sales brochure for the former CIA officials' desired domestic policies.

…

But few members of the rural and conservative segment of the population that troubles insurgency war-gamers are QAnon devotees, and only a tiny sliver had anything to do with the Capitol riot. If they come to support "violent individuals" because they "see them as reflecting their interests and fighting on their behalf," it will be because of deeper divisions and resentments that brought them to that point.

And those resentments really are deep. According to January YouGov polling, 53 percent of Democrats, 56 percent of Republicans, and 57 percent of Independents "think that the biggest threat to their way of life comes from domestic enemies."

The best way to calcify those perceptions of "domestic enemies" is for a government in the hands of one political faction to start treating its opponents as insurgents. That will inevitably entail the excesses and abuses that come with turning the security services loose not just on those who have committed crimes against others, but on whole segments of society viewed as potential threats.

"Overreactions give people an incentive to become terrorists—not only by creating grievances but also by reducing the relative risks of turning to violence," Northeastern University's Max Abrahms, a professor of public policy, recently cautioned in Reason. "A standard assumption in political science is that terrorists are rational actors. Many people decide against becoming terrorists because they know that the costs to them will be severe. But if the government is going to treat innocent people like terrorists anyway, then no additional risk is incurred."

Writing before Grenier's call for counterinsurgency efforts, Abrahms pointed out that John Brennan "did not distinguish between those who use extreme tactics and those with whom he disagrees politically. For Brennan, both are enemies worthy not only of contempt, but action or at least government scrutiny."

Grenier, for his part, wants to adopt tactics used in Afghanistan and Iraq, but neither country is exactly doing spectacular 20 years after the U.S. invaded and began battling insurgents. Iraq's capital city recently suffered two suicide bombings and the Biden administration is poised to, again, delay the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan because of escalating fighting in the country. Do we really want to inflict comparable counterinsurgency campaigns on our own country and risk similar outcomes?

That doesn't mean that we're helpless against politically motivated violence. Grenier rightly suggests that we "investigate and bring to account those who commit crimes." It makes sense to target people for harming others rather than for belonging to suspect groups. If he'd stopped there without talking about counterinsurgency efforts against whole communities, his column would have been unobjectionable.

[backstorywithdanalewis]

White Terror America on Back Story with Dana Lewis podcast link: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1016881/7307512

Trump: (00:00) My fellow Americans. I want to speak to you tonight about the troubling events of the past week. As I have said, the incursion of the U S Capitol struck at the very heart of our Republic, it angered and appalled millions of Americans across the political spectrum. I want to be very clear. I unequivocally condemn the violence Dana Lewis - Host: (00:32) That was president Trump impeached for a second time this week saying he doesn't support violence. And do you believe that after all his calls to fight saying the election result was false and to this moment, refusing to admit he lost his lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani called for trial by combat. Hi everyone. I'm Dana Lewis and welcome to this edition of backstory on white terrorism in America. And it shouldn't be called anything, but that I've spent a lifetime as a journalist covering terrorism around the globe. And it all looks a lot like what's developing in America from the middle East to Russia, to Afghanistan and on and on bus bombs to hostage, takings, fanatics old who justified their bloody rampage because their cause they think is just president. Trump's absolutely false claims of a stolen election have been rejected by every court, but it's ignited people who believe their president was a victim. This guy beat a policemen on the ground with an American flag. And before his arrest, he said, yeah, protester: (01:41) deaths the only remedy for what's in that building. Well, everybody in there is a traitor Dana Lewis - Host: (01:49) Trader and here's policemen, Michael fanone who was dragged down the steps of the Capitol and was going to be shot with his own gun Policeman: (01:58) Fight as best I could. Uh, I remember like guys were stripping me and my gear, these riders, uh, pulling my badge off my chest. Um, they ripped my radio also of, uh, of my vest started pulling, uh, like ammunition magazines from their holder on my belt. And then some guys started getting ahold of my gun and, uh, they were screaming out, um, you know, kill him with his own gun. Um, at that point, you know, it was just like self preservation. Um, you know, how do I survive this situation? And I thought about, you know, using deadly force, I thought about shooting people. Um, and then I just came to the conclusion that, you know, if I was to do that, I might get a few, but I'm not going to take everybody. And they'll probably take my gun away from me. And that would definitely give them the justification that they were looking for to kill me. Policeman: (02:57) Uh, if they already didn't have made that up in their minds. So the other option I thought of was you knew trying to appeal to somebody as humanity. Um, and I, I just remember yelling out that I have kids and, uh, it seemed to work. Um, some people in the crowd started to in circle me and try to offer me some level of protection. A lot of people have asked me, you know, my faults on, uh, the individuals in the crowd that, um, you know, that helped me, uh, or try to offer some assistance. Uh, and I think kind of the conclusion I've come to is like, you know, thank you, but fuck you for being there. Dana Lewis - Host: (03:42) Okay, there are lots of pictures and evidence that there were dozens of white supremacists at the Capitol rally fighting police hunting inside with zip ties to handcuff, and God knows, do what with lawmakers, extremist groups, including the pro-Trump far right antigovernment oath keepers, and the three percenters, a loose antigovernment network. That's part of the militia movement. The hateful imagery included an antisemitic camp Auschwitz sweatshirt created years ago by white supremacists who sold them on the now defunct website. Arion were also among the rioters were members of the griper army, a loose network of white nationalists, the white supremacist, New Jersey European heritage association, and the far right extremist proud boys to name a few. The growth of white supremacists is international, frightening and hard to control. And that brings us to our interview on white supremacy in America and beyond. All right, joining me now from New York is Naureen Chowdhury Fink,.  uh, the executive director of the Soufan center, which is pretty much a security focused think tank or that's how I would describe it, uh, based in Washington and in New York. Hi, Naureen how are you? Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (05:08) Hi, Dana. Good morning from where I'm sitting in New York. Thanks for having me. Dana Lewis - Host: (05:12) It's an incredible time in America. And what would you say is the biggest security threat right now? Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (05:19) Um, you use the word incredible because I think none of us could have imagined the year we're looking at, you know, not just COVID. Um, but everything else we're saying, you asked about the biggest security threat. And I think that in the midst of a pandemic, we are seeing white supremacist and conspiracy theorists, and anti-government groups willing to use terrorism in the name of political change in, in the United States. And to me, that is the most. Um, and, and not just to me, certainly by, by many intelligence assessments and accounts, the greatest terrorist threats to the United States right now. And it's me, Dana Lewis - Host: (05:54) This was a long way in a very short time from the days of Dana Lewis - Host: (05:58) Nine 11 and Al-Qaeda, and, and, uh, you know, Islamic groups, uh, excellent Islamic extremist groups, uh, representing a threat to the United States. How suddenly has this mushroom so quickly? If I can say it's quick? Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (06:13) Sure. Well, I think, I mean, first of all, it's been, we're looking at the 20th year anniversary coming up of nine 11. So it has been two decades and an eventful one at that. So we've seen things evolve and change. I think we've seen the white supremacist groups, you know, it, there's a long history there and certainly you and I just very briefly mentioned the headline. Exactly. So we are building on, uh, you know, we are building on a movement that has been there for quite some time, certainly in this country, but we know that a lot of dynamics, sometimes I hate to use the word accelerate in this context, but you know, you have catalysts and certainly with the infusion of the internet disinformation queue and on, um, sort of this deteriorating trust in government, um, I'm going to use a really long word and mess it up here. Anti-establishment, Marianism kind of take, you know, take, hold in the United States and elsewhere. I think we've seen a kind of perfect storm and no pun intended with the capital. Dana Lewis - Host: (07:15) All right. As we talked to Noreen, I should mention that she was the senior policy advisor on counter-terrorism and sanctions at the UK mission to the United nations. I mean, Naureen, you're not new to this. You've been doing this for a long time. Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (07:27) That's right. More than I care to more years than I care to admit in public, but I've been looking at this, you know, for about 15, 16 years now. And one of the things I think has been remarkable as much as we talk about nine 11, certainly being the linchpin of counter-terrorism discussions for many years, this has also been a global phenomenon. And I think you, you know, when, when we talk about the security risk in the United States, we need to remember there are others abroad watching, planning to emulate, and these dynamics, you know, build on each other, right. We saw white supremacist groups really take heart in under his brave acts attack in Norway. I mean, the fact that he was able to kill like 70 kids and, and, you know, the greatest terrorist attack, um, in Norway and in much of Europe and it really served as fodder for, for groups abroad. And so what happens in the United States, certainly the greatest security threat we're seeing here may well have also international repercussions. We've already seen the attacks and Christ church attacks in Norway, and we will see more, unfortunately. So it's in the United States and beyond Trump, Dana Lewis - Host: (08:34) It was regularly downplayed the threat of white supremacist violence during his presidency. He said there were some very fine people among the extremists who sparked violence in Charlottesville in 2017. He called black lives matter, a symbol of hate, and he's regularly, regularly pushed narratives on Twitter that emphasize violence against white Americans. He seeks to Curry support in the suburbs. What would you say about Donald Trump's role in the growth of extremism within the United States and specifically white supremacy? Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (09:08) You know, um, when I was growing up parents and family, friends used to say, you're known by the company you keep and that's how you'll be judged. And I think it says a lot about the fact that we had a president of the United States that was willing to serve just one community and one set of interests rather than the country as a whole. He has, we have seen provided a critical figurehead. Um, he has broken the seal on what is permissible in public, what you say, what you do and how you even conceptualize this country. And I think we, you know, it, it will be really hard to put that genie back in the bottle, whether he stays, whether he goes, he has provided that kind of ideological centerpiece for divisiveness in this country. And he has made it acceptable to use terrorist tactics to achieve the goals he talks about. So, um, I I'm afraid that, you know, whether he stays or whether he goes, and of course, whether he goes and what kind of accountability there is for the acts that he has incited, um, and committed, uh, will have a lot to do with the outcome. But the fact that he did it at all for the last four years and the fact that we have seen four years of growth and development in this narrative, the Q1 on movement, um, and the fact of polarization, I think there's grave damage done already Dana Lewis - Host: (10:34) Is mega make America great. Again, that movement is that a terror threat, James Clooney, the former head of the FBI says it is or aspects of it to quote him directly. Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (10:48) I think that's a very important nuance aspects of it. We certainly live in a country where people are free to have different ideas of what constitutes greatness and government. And certainly, um, you know, I, I like to think America was great before, but if they feel, you know, if there's aspects of the maca movement that think there should be improvements in government, I would very, I'd be very hesitant and to live in a country where they couldn't have their say. What I think is extraordinary is when it tips into the use of violence, as we saw in the Capitol, you know, what happened on the Capitol, doesn't just, um, it will not obviously just affect Democrats once that is done. The use of violence for that kind of politics, um, should have been a seal that we never break. And so I don't, I don't really want to talk about the, the Maga movement as a whole, because as in any political movements, we will see nuances and layers of, you know, some people just have different political ideas and we can disagree, but debate them. Um, and some people who are willing to use violence, I think it's that latter group. We need to be careful, Dana Lewis - Host: (11:56) Bigger role. Do you think white nationalism played in the attack on the Capitol Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (12:01) A huge role? I mean, if we just look at the images, just imagine that was a group of Muslims. I mean, we talked about nine 11, we talked about the last 20 years of the global war on terror. If that was a group from the Muslim community in the United States storming the Capitol, we would not be debating the nuances of terminology like insurrection or terrorism or, you know, rebellion. We, we would, we would certainly be here at called out as terrorism. Um, and so I think there was undoubtedly a sense of entitlement, a sense of privilege, a sense of impunity tied to white supremacist and white nationalist ideas. You know, we sitting here in Brooklyn and New York, we, we saw last year what the black lives matter protests were treated like. Um, we can imagine, as I said, if these were communities, not just Muslim communities, any communities of color that tried to, to, um, perpetrate those acts we saw last week, um, the, you know, there would be no debate about a law enforcement response. A lot of this has to do with the community feeling so entitled and so privileged and able to do this. So, Dana Lewis - Host: (13:11) So in a way we see shockingly off-duty policemen that were in that crowd, flashing badges, assaulting other policemen, or using their badges to gain an access fireman, um, you know, uh, elected members of office, uh, soccer moms. But I mean, there were official people there from, and a lot of these policemen have gone back to their States now and they have been suspended and will probably be prosecuted Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (13:38) The, in the coming days and weeks, we will see what, what appears to be a very strong, our response to those who have dishonored their badges, um, and participated in this. But, you know, we are seeing reports of infiltration across the world in different law enforcement, military police, um, armed services, uh, by white supremacist far, right. Extremist groups, you know, and we have to remember, these are individuals as well. There is no, um, uniform, uh, sort of, uh, code, you know, sorry, there's a uniform code. I mean, there's no universal kind of person, right? So we will see individuals of different political and ideological color. I think it's gravely, gravely concerning. And I think very much a sort of white supremacist, um, entitlement means that many signs of this may have gone under, um, under noticed under reported. And, you know, we at the Soufan center and, and others have been calling out the white supremacist threat as something that needs to be taken far more seriously needs, far more resources, um, a lot of to it. And we hadn't seen that happening. I mean, in Germany. Dana Lewis - Host: (14:48) In fact, in fact, I read that Ali Soufan was formerly with the FBI and dealt with international terrorism. In fact, he has been threatened for his calls to name some of these groups, terrorist groups and have, and have them outlawed. I mean, if, if I can use that term Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (15:07) Well, absolutely. And I think, um, the, the, the Soufan center was out front last year, calling this out as the next greatest domestic, uh, threat from domestic terrorism, but we still did not see the kind of preventive action, the kind of resources, allot allotted to investigate and understand and preempt this threat as we saw with, with G Dana Lewis - Host: (15:31) Well, why is that? Is it because they underestimate them or because they accept them? Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (15:37) Well, I think it is easier to talk about the threat outside where you don't have political financial, familial community relationships. Right. We can talk about international terrorist groups says we can talk about monitoring individuals abroad or from abroad because the, not us, it's not in our community. And so from a political social economic point of view, and in many ways it's easier to monitor foreign threats. Legally speaking, of course, we don't have a domestic terrorism law, and so we can take different kinds of action when the threat is from abroad. Um, Dana Lewis - Host: (16:17) So just explain that to me because a lot of people don't understand that. I mean, if you classify some of these groups, like for instance, proud boys or gags and flags, or, I mean, whatever, the, whatever the group is, if you classify them as a terrorist organization, then that allows the FBI a lot more leeway in terms of investigating them in terms of surveillance, in terms of monitoring, uh, electronic surveillance and also physical surveillance and all of that. And, and it allows people to look into their financing, doesn't it? Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (16:54) Absolutely. And I think that latter clause is especially important also because it means you can look at material support to these groups. And we know that, you know, such groups don't just recruit fighters and finance here's right there, there are now advertising for doctors and medics and logisticians and whatnot. So they are looking at, uh, they're looking for a wide array of material support and classifying. Yes. In fact, there are echoing very much, you know, what ISIS had done ISIS had said, you don't have to be a fighter to come to the caliphate. You can come be a doctor, a nurse, a teacher, you know, come be who you want to be in the caliphate. And we are seeing a lot of, um, a lot of that now where groups are putting out ads saying, for example, you know, you don't have to be a fighter if you want to be like a medic and come help us. Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (17:41) And we're seeing ads and pictures like that. Um, so I think they definitely speak to each other. Um, more broadly we've seen white supremacist groups really echo some of the learning from jihadist groups from all of, from ISIS, you know, how to make bombs, how to radicalize, how to organize, how to mobilize. They're definitely learning from each other. So yes, to your question, um, uh, domestic terror, uh, terrorism law would enable a lot of the actions, which you outlined. However, there's also a very valid concern about the potential for overreach, right? And if we, and how do we make sure that there's very strong criteria for designating a group as terrorists? You know, I would be very wary of others who would want to suddenly, um, you know, designate black lives matter protests as terrorist action. Um, I would be wary of using the terrorism label all the time, without really thinking through the repercussions on civilization. Dana Lewis - Host: (18:37) It was pretty simple to me, you know, and, and I, and I don't say it in a naive way because I've been in other countries where they have tried to deal with some of these groups. And if you say, if you designate somebody, a terror group, you were saying that they are going to take some kind of armed action to terrorize the public or represent a, a armed threat to the state. So it's not that, you know, you don't like a posting on the, on the internet. Then you say that, you know, he's a terrorist. It, it would have to be some kind of planned conspiracy to develop a physical threat and attack in America is, is why is it so complicated? Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (19:22) Well, I think because many of the actions that we would consider preparatory or leading up to it are protected in the United States. So you have free speech, which allows you to say whatever, you know, certainly there's hate speech, but you know, a lot of the preparatory speech and narrative, and, you know, what we would, you know, even in, in the UK and other places, maybe look at online harms and incitement, um, in the United States, it's protected. Of course you can carry weapons here, so you can save many of these things and you can carry your weapon and you can happen to be walking past, you know, somewhere that you think is a good target. And until the moment you do something, all of those actions are protected. Um, I think so in the United States for good and for bad, many of these actions are protected. And so it is a more difficult conversation where you draw the line between protect constitutionally protected actions and speech. Dana Lewis - Host: (20:16) I think that lawmakers are prepared to draw that line. Now, though, more than they've ever been given what's happened. Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (20:23) I think there will be increasing calls to look into it. And I'm, and I'm choosing my words carefully. Dana Lewis - Host: (20:29) That sounds a bit weak, not on your part, but you don't feel that it's reached this tipping point after the, the assault on the Capitol that lawmakers now will say, okay, that's it. I mean, groups like proud boys, Nazi and white supremacists, um, th that are engaging in recruiting, uh, and calling for violence. Then we have to act on that before it happens. Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (20:59) I mean, there's an argument to be made and others will. I'm sorry, I've been doing a lot of, you know, I've been doing academic research and diplomacy for a while, so I will have to look at both sides, but I think there are others who will say, you can prosecute this without, you know, you can prosecute acts of murder. You can prosecute prepper, preparatory, acts towards violence, and you can prosecute incitement to violence. Um, I think that there are cases where, of course the, the terrorism label, um, and the having a domestic terror terrorism statute is important. I, I think they will be looking into it. I think it is one of the most fundamentally difficult questions to address when it's constitutional protections. We're talking about, Dana Lewis - Host: (21:42) Maybe it's better to talk about this in terms of smaller steps than at the very least these groups are now more than ever on the FBI's and Homeland security's radar. You think now they are going to start assigning more people to it, understanding that it represents a grave threat to the nation. Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (21:59) Absolutely. I think we're going to see more resources allocated. I think very importantly, you know, we talked about a sense of entitlement and impunity. You'll also see more senior leaders speaking out against it. You will see more law enforcement attention to it, which means as you say, you know, resources. And like I said, these groups don't exist in an American vacuum. They have partners, funders, um, supporters abroad in similar groups. And so the more there is action at a senior level in the United States with the FBI and law enforcement agencies and politicians, it also means in other countries that we can partner up with them and make sure we address the transnational dimension of these issues. Dana Lewis - Host: (22:41) Where else, if you were just to name off the top five or two or three, w where else do you see them really proliferating, uh, in a worrisome level internationally? Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (22:50) Sure. Well, we've seen in Germany reports that some of the most elite law enforcement and police and military teams have been infiltrated by far right groups. We've also seen the German government take very early and decisive action to allocate resources and, and address this head on, you know, I think it was, uh, I want to say $80 million was maybe euros. I'm sorry about that. I don't have the exact figure, but a large amount of money in the 80 million, um, uh, sort of estimate has been allocated now to look into it. The government is on notice and very public in, uh, you know, in addressing this as a threat, calling it unacceptable, unacceptable, and launching investigations. Certainly Norway we saw after the brave Vic attacks went very, very quickly into, um, you know, investing a lot more in prevention and addressing violent extremism, writ large, and certainly New Zealand. And in the aftermath of the attacks in Christ church, we have seen, they launched the Christ church call and are working very closely to look at the online dimension of this. And this is what the UK also supported. Um, prime minister, Boris Johnson had committed resources to looking at what is happening online to these groups so that we can work on, um, addressing their online presence. Dana Lewis - Host: (24:09) Do you think it is in America because probably a lot of people had the impression that, you know, there's some guys living up in the mountains in Tennessee or something, and, uh, you know, that it's very fringe, it seems like it's evolved to become far more mainstream. When I take a look at some of those videos, uh, from around the Capitol, I was shocked at that and, and, and read about the different groups that were participating. I mean, proud boys, Q Anon, um, which is a right-wing wingy cult, Nazi and white supremacists, including, you know, wearing this shirt shirt, Candace. Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (24:50) Yeah. And the six M w E. Okay. Dana Lewis - Host: (24:53) Uh, noose was posted around the Capitol, which is apparently a fantasy day of, of the rope that traders will be hanged in the street gags, then flags yellow, American flags that dates back to 1778, uh, you know, w w with the rattlesnake and the words don't tread on me from the revolutionary war, the 3% are flag, which, um, I thought it's quite ominous in its own way, because it said it took only 3% of American people to revolt against the British. And in this context, it's a signal that a small number of so-called Patriots, all you, that's all you need for a successful revolution. I mean, there, there's a wide berth of very bizarre groups there that any of them stand out to you or do all of them. Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (25:38) Yeah. I think it's exactly what you've just said. You've kind of hit it on the nail. It's the fact that it's many, many different groups kind of coalescing into a similar worldview. Right. Um, I think it is much more widespread. Like you, I think one of the most, like you just said, one of the most horrifying images for me was that news outside the Capitol, you know, we're, we're so transfixed on the kind of dramatic Q Anon shaman and his horns that we forget that the new, some of the zip ties is really the image, um, that we should, I think be very, very concerned about because so many different groups coalesced around these ideas, the ideas that the governments are traders, the ideas that the democratic process itself needs to be appended. So I D this is not certainly a fringe movement. Uh, we've heard a lot of families say that, you know, this is a concern in my community. Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (26:31) I can no longer talk to family members because they're on some spectrum of these ideologies. Um, you know, I think we, we do have to remember, like we've seen with all Qaeda with ISIS, you know, there are some people who, because they're anonymous online, they get, they can say what they want. There's no real consequence. It requires no real courage or action or commitment to say things online. Um, what I think the problem of, you know, one of the many problems with the Capitol attack is that it mobilized people to move from an online world where things are just fantasies and maybe don't require commitment. And when you have an example of people that did follow through with action, it creates a kind of, um, you know, a Mo a very mobilizing narrative for those who may have been maybe on the, um, on the fence about whether to move from the online, into the real world. Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (27:24) Um, at the same time, we know that just having a few activists, um, often they can be successful when there are layers of support behind them. You know, the ideologues, the narrators, the small financeers, the small businesses that support them, the communities that back them up, you know, the moms that defend them, the dads that egg them on, you know, um, all of these, um, you know, so I think when we look at not just those who are willing to take action, but the wide group of people that are willing to support them, I mean, just looking at the support for presence Dana Lewis - Host: (27:57) And how do you, how do you fight that? I mean, yeah, looking at the support for president Trump, and he's got a lot of it, but, you know, maybe he will fade, but, and maybe he won't, but how do you deal with that scope of so many people that have been told by him that the election wasn't free? It wasn't fair. It was a fraud, it was stolen from you, stop the steal we have to fight. And that, that message, uh, you know, is, is pretty dangerous because I, you know, I, uh, a couple of the interviews with people who went to that re that riot, um, a few months ago, uh, were not that radicalized on the internet. And so a lot of it has been compressed, uh, as, as we've, as we've heard this constant echo of president Trump saying it's been stolen from us. Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (28:49) Well, part of that compression day now will also be the impact of COVID-19. There are more people at home, the more people that are scared, uncertain, spending time online, and, you know, we've seen UN reports, we've heard widespread, um, reporting there, more young people spending all day online. They, there are people with, you know, who've lost their jobs, lost their homes. And so I have to say, it's, it's really not surprising that this has all accelerated and compressed against the backdrop of a lockdown, an unprecedented global shutdown of, you know, other valves for engagement. Um, and so I think that this is not something we have seen necessarily on this scale, because we haven't had this background. Uh, we talked a bit again earlier about the 20 years since nine 11, we have worked on so many different iterations of counter narratives campaigns, counter campaigns, some are spectacular failures, some have shown some success, right? Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (29:46) The ones that have shown success seem to be ones that are really tailored to local environments, really, based on a sound understanding of why people find some of this messaging messaging appealing. And that means we need to do better to understand where some of these groups are coming from, because it's, it looks like one big global message of kind of, um, militant does illusionism, but it is actually different groups with different kinds of, um, trajectories to get there. So I think we will have to start looking into our lessons learned over the last 20 years on counter messaging, counter narratives, and do better to understand the, the knowledge base of each of the groups that has come up, um, and how that operates online. But I really think we can't ignore the fact that this is happening against the backdrop of COVID and more people online, less interaction. Um, you know, on a whole more people are just interacting with themselves, with their families, with their very, very close friends, right? They don't even have access to people outdoors and in the long run, I, you know, we we'll see what that does to people, whether in a, in a very normal sense in the workforce and in day-to-day communities, but in these kinds of spaces, the potential effects are alarming. Dana Lewis - Host: (31:03) Norine child rethink from the Sioux fan center. You know, I think we're going to have another talk soon because there's just so much here. Um, and you know, it's not going to go away quickly. And a lot of it will depend on how the Republican party delivers its message in the future about this election. Uh, and, and whether they start saying that it was fair and they poke a hole in, in this, you know, ridiculous cloud that Trump has put over the electoral process and democracy, which right now they're not stepping up a lot. Some are, but some are not. Naureen really pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much. Naureen Chowdhury Fink - Soufan center: (31:43) Thank you for having me, Dana, look forward to speaking again, Dana Lewis - Host: (31:45) And that's backstory. I'm Dana Lewis, please subscribe to our podcast and sheriff my advice spend less time on social media, especially right now, spend more time watching mainstream press and TV news. And if Trump and his Q Anon followers call it fake news, that usually means it's not thanks for listening. And I'll talk to you again soon.

[tridentine2013]

Corbyn - What if you are wrong?

Ok, so you hate Jeremy Corbyn; but what if you are wrong to?

I get it. You are furious that a major political party in the UK has a leader who is an ‘IRA sympathiser’. Incensed that he is ‘weak’ on defence; a pacifist. Enraged that he didn’t sing the national anthem that time … boiling mad that he didn’t campaign effectively for ‘remain’, and that he is a Marxist puppet of the troublemaker trades unions, who cosies up to extremists and wants to borrow even more money which we ‘cannot afford’, especially since Labour already ‘crashed the economy’, and are not fiscally competent. He voted time and again against anti-terror legislation, wouldn’t push the nuclear button, isn’t a royalist, and wants to tax your home, your garden, your work and your inheritance. He’s scruffy, he’s an enemy of business, and he supports uncontrolled immigration. You know this, because everyone knows. Everyone except the barmy army of dupes and gulls who hang on his every word like brainwashed sheep. But what if you are wrong? What might you be passing up by holding to ‘your views’, because the media you trust have exposed these truths time after time?

Let’s address the issue of most concern to many, Corbyn the terrorist sympathiser and appeaser. In this context, the IRA issue is pre-eminent. I dare to suggest that most British people not living in Northern Ireland have a very limited grasp of the politics of Ireland, little understanding of the period from William of Orange to the Easter Rising, or the ‘Anglo Irish Treaty’, the establishment of the Irish Free State, or what precipitated ‘The Troubles’ from the mid-1960s to 1998. But that is not important. What is important is that you know that the IRA murdered and bombed their way around the six counties and the mainland for many years, inflicting harm on innocent civilians along the way. And that anyone who showed support for them was obviously anti-British, and by definition a terrorist sympathiser. Do you believe then, that it is ‘not the British way’ to try to find a solution to a 20-year-old guerrilla conflict, which might bring the killings to an end? Some of you may remember Margaret Thatcher proclaiming that the British Government would “… never negotiate with terrorists”. But in 2011 cabinet papers were released which showed that in 1981 she did just that, during the ‘hunger strikes’. But she was not the first; in 1969, the British Army met senior figures in the IRA. In 1971, they met again in secret talks. In 1972 Irish Labour Party politicians acted as a ‘conduit’ for talks between the IRA and Reginald Maudling of the Conservative government of the UK. Later in 1972 MI6, the UK Government, and the British Army held talks in N.I. and subsequently the IRA ‘top brass’ were flown to secret talks in London. This trip included Martin McGuiness and Gerry Adams. Willie Whitelaw represented the British Government, led by Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath. From 1973 to 1976 many more secret talks were held. In 1977 Douglas Hurd met Gerry Adams and Danny Morrison. These secret ‘back channel’ communications were not suspended until 1982. And the it gets interesting. In 1983 Ken Livingstone met with Gerry Adams in Belfast, which led to an invitation to the Palace of Westminster in 1984, extended by Livingstone and fellow MP Jeremy Corbyn. In 1986 Gerry Adams MP, president of Sinn Féin, and Tom King MP, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, entered into secret correspondence, carried out by intermediaries. With the approval of prime minister Margaret Thatcher, King lays out the UK’s position for negotiations. Livingstone, Corbyn, and many other Labour and Tory politicians had come to the view that a military solution was not possible. In 1988 James M. Glover, former Commander-in-Chief of the UK Land Forces, admitted during television documentary that the Irish Republican Army cannot be defeated militarily, and the most rational period of the entire troubles followed, 1989 to 1994, known historically as the peace process period, beginning under Thatcher in which (1991 on) the British Government held regular covert talks with the IRA which ultimately led to the 1999 ceasefire, and eventually the Good Friday Agreement. Jeremy Corbyn’s role was perhaps minor, but it was, in contrast to many politicians, open and honest. It was, in keeping with Corbyn’s political beliefs, an attempt to explore the opportunities for peace.

But he definitely didn’t sing the National Anthem though …   that much is true. Jeremy Corbyn is a democrat and a republican. And definitely a man of principle. A man of peace. He sat in silent contemplation, reflecting perhaps on the horrors of war; who can actually say?

But do we prefer armies of politicians who fiddle their expenses, avoid tax, break promises, lie in court, ’employ’ family members as researchers or office managers, take money from ‘lobbyists’ or in countless ways abuse their position and privilege, so long as they sing the National Anthem? Liam Fox for example, our current Conservative Secretary of State for International Trade. Who had to repay over £22,000 of falsely claimed mortgage expenses, and claimed £19,000 in 4 years in ‘mobile phone charges’. Liam Fox who failed to declare several trips abroad paid by foreign governments, who simultaneously rented out his London home whilst claiming the cost of living in rented accommodation (£19,000) from the state. Liam Fox who took his close male friend Adam Werrity to MOD meetings with foreign dignitaries at the taxpayer’s expense, even though Werrity had no security clearance. I bet he would sing the National Anthem with gusto.

What Jeremy Corbyn did do however, apart from not sing the National Anthem, was to stay talking with ex-service veterans, while the other ‘dignitaries’ at the Remembrance Day event went off for a taxpayer funded slap up lunch. To suggest that you would rather he had simply sung the National Anthem ‘out of respect’ is to endorse the Liam Foxxes of this world. To imply that it is ok to act abominably so long as you give the appearance of having the interests your country, not naked self-interest as your primary motivation. This affair was actually an example of the kinder, fairer, more honest politics which Jeremy Corbyn seeks to encourage. You may not agree with him in this regard. You may be a ‘patriot and a royalist’. But we have the only National Anthem which conflates support for the royal family with patriotism. Which does not, if god is invoked at all, ask him to favour and protect the nation, instead suggesting he does so by proxy in favouring the monarch, and the monarch’s enduring rule. Is it unpatriotic to be a republican? Is it not possible if you are German, or French, or Irish, to be ‘patriotic’? Jeremy Corbyn is a proud Briton. But he draws that pride from how in our best selves, collectively, we treat all humanity. When we do not invade or destabilise, undermine or subvert other countries for our own economic gain. When we do not attack other nations on false pretexts, when we look after our own, be it our disabled population, or other socially disadvantaged groups … When we show global leadership in human rights. When we improve the entire world by scientific or medical breakthroughs, when we are the best we can be.

But he is a Marxist, and that is reason enough to hate the man with a passion. Except that he isn’t. He just isn’t. I hope that we are agreed he does stand by his principles, whether we agree with them or not? In his over 30 years in politics, he has presented himself as a democratic socialist. The wealth of ‘Marxist and Marxist-Leninist’ groups have never had Corbyn on their membership list. But it’s his policies that mark him out as a Marxist? I cannot go into the technical reasons that Corbyn cannot credibly be argued to be a Marxist, but it is worth remembering that what motivated Marx and Engels was the interests of the working man, and the establishment of a system of economics which offered an alternative to capitalism. Marx believed the capitalist system bore insoluble contradictions, and contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction. In 2008 the inherent flaws of free market economics were laid bare. Marx was in many respects visionary. His ideas about the exploitation of Labour, the primacy, within the system, of those owning the means of production, the problems created by overproduction have become manifest. But that is a separate discussion. The fact is that Jeremy Corbyn is somewhere between a democratic socialist and a social democrat. This should not describe a position on the political spectrum which troubles or scares you unless you are someone who has become hugely wealthy, largely by paying workers considerably less than their labour value. Jeremy Corbyn is a pragmatic socialist, with an objective of progressive, achievable change to a more equitable and rewarding system for the individual worker. He is broadly in line with the theories of Keynesian economics, and fundamentally opposed to the idea that ‘austerity’ is or was a necessary response to the circumstances of the 2008 global crash. Whilst we are on the subject, we might look at some evidence from the Office of National Statistics, regarding the immediate post-crash growth. 

          The graphic above charts the actual GDP growth over the period shown. The post-crash trough which bottomed out in 2009 demonstrates that in less than a year from the trough, GDP growth had returned to positive, from a low of -2.4%. From shrinking 2.4%, to shrinking less, (relative growth) to actual positive growth for 3 quarters before the 2010 election. Since then, we see a very stagnant period, with virtually no growth, which looks set to continue into the foreseeable future, due to lack of investment. Yes Corbyn, and Labour would borrow more money, which at historically low interest rates, would be spent in areas of the economy, including infrastructure … building etc., to stimulate economic activity and growth, which (the theory goes) would be more than capable of creating the wealth to meet the increased interest costs, providing a faster paydown of international loans than to meet interest payments by continuing to impoverish the public sector including schools, the NHS, and social care. Corbyn’s Labour seek to create better wages, and a better standard of living for all working people. Even the 5%, or 1 in 20 people who would pay higher taxes will actually earn more collectively, in a better performing economy.

But are Labour not demonstrably, historically worse at running the economy that the Conservatives? You may be surprised, since this is a claim made daily, usually by more than one Tory politician, that it simply does not bear scrutiny. It isn’t true. (1) The Conservatives have been the biggest borrowers over 70 years. (2) Labour have borrowed less and paid back more debt than the Tories even during the ‘Neo-Liberal era’ since 1979. (3) 130 leading economists endorsed Labour’s spending plans as detailed in their 2017 manifesto. Many issues are misrepresented regarding their ‘cost’ to the state of course; the ‘huge’ cost of renationalising key industries such as the railways is a case in point. In this case the systemic change would occur in stages, as the existing franchises expired, the lines will become state owned and operated. In other nationalisations, the principle which applies is that the industry is bought, effectively, with government bonds sold on the debt market providing the funds to purchase the shareholding, either majority or total, and take control thereby of future profits. The obsession with selling off the public sector to private interests, for profit, has been enduring and extensive. And value is extracted from the water, power, and transport sectors, from refuse, prisons, NHS, parts of the Courts System, Police, Care Homes, collection of business rates, Army recruitment, TV licensing, custodial and immigration services, and disability assessment. Do we want or need private companies extracting value (private sector profit) from these services? In many cases nationalised or part nationalised businesses in other states are the ultimate beneficiary.

But he has voted against ‘anti-terror’ legislation time and again, that is true. Does he want terrorists on our streets or something? No. Jeremy Corbyn voted in the main, against anti-terror legislation which was frequently framed to permit definitions of terrorism which impinged on our own rights or civil liberties, against 14 day detention, (so did May), against Control Orders, (so did May), against ID cards, (so did May), against 90 day detention, (so did May), against the Counter Terrorism Act 2008, another attempt to extend detention without charge (to 42 days on this occasion) ,a vote from which May was absent, against TPIMs, which May supported. Do we want our politicians to speak out if they see legislation being proposed which whist having a specific claimed purpose, creates the possibility of loose interpretation or wanton misuse, against our own interests? It is right that our civil rights are front and centre of such debates, and this is the reason why so much ‘anti-terror legislation has been either defeated or considerably amended between readings. Corbyn wants the public to be safe, but from the abuse of process by the state, as well as from terrorism.

But the Unions though, bunch of leftie troublemakers! Maggie sorted them out.  The relationship between Labour and Trade Unions is as old as the Party itself. Trade Unions were once just about the only organised resistance to the systematic abuse of British workers. The Labour Party, originally the Labour Representation Committee, was formed to increase workers’ representation in Parliament, a Parliament made up almost exclusively of the historical ‘powers that be’, the Tories (Conservatives) and the Whigs (Liberals). The function of a trade union is to look after the interests of its members, and that is as true today as it has ever been. The fact that Thatcher era propaganda ‘demonised’ Unions has been entirely to the advantage of business. The Labour Party and the Trade Unions of today, (although stripped of much of the power they once had) are a bulwark against the worst excesses of the exploitation of Labour. If you hold to the Thatcherite view of unions, and are not leading a large corporation, you would do well to study the reality behind the rhetoric.

But the nuclear button. How could we have a Prime Minister who wouldn’t defend us against our enemies? Corbyn doesn’t even want us to have a nuclear capability. He wants to scrap the Trident replacement programme. Jeremy Corbyn has stated, on record, “We want a secure and peaceful world. We achieve that by promoting peace, but also by promoting security”. What he has also said, (in paraphrase) whilst holding to the opinion that all wars are a failure of diplomacy, is that there are circumstances in which he would support military action. But reluctant to send our soldiers to foreign lands to pursue political objectives? Unpersuaded that we have not in the past been too quick to adopt the military option, on occasion embarking on wars which were illegal in international law? Yes, without doubt. So he is someone committed to defending our interests, but in search always of a nonviolent, peaceful, negotiated solution to potential conflict, who approaches military options as a ‘last resort’? I would hope that this approach to defence would be popular with most reasonably minded people.

He is as is well known, a unilateralist. Which means that Britain under Corbyn would be seeking to take the lead in international efforts to bring about an end to nuclear weapons globally. We would pass legislation to dismantle our own nuclear arsenal, and seek to do so whilst leading an international initiative aimed at achieving, by negotiation, a nuclear free world. There is a credible roadmap to nuclear disarmament, and there are options, when such a process is complete, to see that no country develops such a capability again. I would hope that all our descendants are born into a world in which the threat of total annihilation is no longer ever present. Could any of us claim, in circumstances where Jeremy Corbyn is asked to consider authorising the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, that as a civilisation we have achieved anything worthwhile? The dogma of mutually assured destruction is outdated. There are simply so many ‘battlefield weapons’, also known as ‘tactical nuclear weapons’, for the M.A.D. logic to remain credible. When generals in the field have access to small, strategic warheads, designed to create tactical advantage by eliminating mere thousands of troops, (and any civilians in the very localised blast zone) we have a recipe for a disastrous escalation.

Jeremy Corbyn is a peacemaker, a military ‘dove’, who wishes to use the position of Leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister to improve the circumstances of the British people, whilst seeking also to take initiatives to stabilise, and make more peaceful the wider world. Those who seek to convince us that this is ideological and unachievable are frequently those who are in some form benefiting from the huge sums spent each year around the world, on ‘things to kill people with’.  

What you could be passing up, with your determination to not rationally reassess your view of Jeremy Corbyn, is everything you ever dreamed of. For you, your children and your children’s children. This is not hyperbole, this is about the future not just of the UK, but the world. You and I share a world where $1.6 trillion is spent on ‘defence’. The collective means to harm one another. One point six thousand BILLION dollars, at immense cost to the mere seven billion inhabitants of the planet. A stack of dollars, every year, which piled up would stretch over 80,000 miles. Yes, we spend annually, as a civilisation, a pile of money eighty thousand miles high, on stuff to harm one another. Or if stacked on their side, more than three times around the circumference of the earth.I don’t want that to continue, Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t want that to continue, and we neither of us could imagine that you want this to continue. The spend on the collective means to harm one another equates to $240 per head for every living being; 3 billion of whom currently live on less than $2.50 per day. Jeremy Corbyn’s call for talk, diplomacy, consensus, agreement, rather than war, is informed by many things. The most powerful is the idea that we really shouldn’t be killing one another. (378,000 deaths per year attributed to wars during the relatively peaceful 1985 to 1994.) It isn’t a civilised way to behave. But another important factor is the 1.6 thousand billion dollars could be used in so many more humane and socially beneficial ways. In the UK we spend forty five thousand million pounds a year on ‘defence’. And Jeremy Corbyn is not even suggesting a reduction to the ‘defence’ budget. In fact, since the war the Tories have on average reduced the defence budget by 0.5% during each year in power. Labour in power, over the same period, have increased defence spending by 2.4% per year. We can talk later about other ways to spend that money, but for the moment I would like to explain why I am talking in largely global terms, about one party leader, in one country, the UK. It is because a better WORLD is possible.

Jeremy Corbyn is not a figure without parallel in global politics. There are, and have always been leaders of parties or even countries, whose objective has been the best possible future for their people. Senator Bernie Sanders ran a campaign in the US Presidential ‘primaries’ which enjoyed huge (yuge) popular support, for an agenda which promised to give greater power to individual Americans in the process and management of the US political system. He faced seemingly insurmountable odds, not least because of the enormous amount of money needed to even campaign effectively. That he did not win the Democratic Party nomination is largely due to a particularly undemocratic structure within the party’s nomination system. He ran Hilary Clinton almost to the wire, and in the end, it was power and money in the hands of an elite which prevented his election as the Democratic Party Presidential nominee. Sanders also represented a fairer, kinder politics. For the many, not the few, to borrow a phrase.  

Instead, Trump triumphed against Clinton, in a contest which could easily have produced a very different result had the race been between Sanders and Trump. But in a little over 3 years, Americans will return to the polling booths. Were that to coincide with a Jeremy Corbyn Labour Party in power in the UK, the impulse toward real change could become irresistible. If you can begin to imagine a world where the most powerful leaders, of the most powerful countries, were genuinely committed to a peaceful world in which the living and working conditions, the health and fortune of the average person was of primary importance, things could change for the better very quickly.

  (1)    http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2016/03/13/the-conservatives-have-been-the-biggest-borrowers-over-the-last-70-years/

(2)    http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2016/03/14/labour-have-borrowed-less-and-repaid-more-than-the-conservatives-since-1979/

(3)     http://www.primeeconomics.org/articles/guws3cyv3ctq9g7vg754p2zyymvc2f/

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[milenenestarkrogers]

How can a country move on when its people turn against their own?

Chile is not at war. The People has awoken and we will never close our eyes again!

If you haven’t read or heard about the difficult situation going on in Chile, please take a moment to read this, and then go and search for info on your own.

Chile has been qualified as the economical oasis of Latin America. But we couldn't be so further away from that.

Yes. There’s money... But it’s only for the rich. The minimum wage is $301.000 CLP, about 414 USD for today's conversion (Oct. 23.2019)  where 1 USD costs about 727 Chilean pesos. (Out lowest bill is a $1.000 and out lowest coin is $10)

I’ll put my family as an example. My parents work in the streets markets (Feria) My Dad sells fruits to make a living (tangerines, avocados, lemons and oranges). My Mom sells used items of clothing and house stuff (curtains, bed sheets, etc.) I’m unemployed because I haven’t graduated officially and I take care of my bedridden grandmother. We have enough to live, not a penny less, not one penny more.  My Father is the one who carries the weight of most of the house expenses and he, like many others, does not earn the same amount of money each month. So let me break it down for you:

4 people household:

Basic food items, 2 each: pasta, rice, vegetable oil, tuna cans, mayo, milk, paper towels, toilet paper, salt, sugar, beans and some miscellaneous items: comes to an amount of at least $80.000 CLP (110.19 USD)

Light bills: $36.000 CLP  (49.69 USD)

Water bills: $25.000 (34.44 USD) to $28.000 CLP (38.57 USD)

Internet bill (no land phone): $17.000 (23.42 USD)

Celphones: $27.000 (37.19 USD)

Gas (petrol) for the trucks: $50.000 (68.87 USD)

Gas for shower and kitchen (It’s sold in cans, we buy the 15kl cans): $45.000 (61.98 USD)

This list gives us the whooping amount of $283.000 CLP (389.81 USD). Remember, the minimum wage is $301.000 and I’m not including, public transport (where I live we don’t have Metro (subway/tube), medical bills (which are fucking high because public health sucks ass), medicines, and extra expenses for when you care for an old person and my college bill, which I don’t want to even think about because it’s millions of pesos that I’ll have to pay for the rest of my life because I studied with the CAE (Credito con aval del estado) a deal where the government pays for my college ed until I graduate and then two years later I have to start paying all the money back with interest.

Now that you have this picture in your head, imagine how others live, when there are families of five or more living with less than the minimum wage. My family manages to live like this, but there are others that are not as lucky.

The elderly people have to live with pensions as low as $84.000 CLP (115.7 USD) I’ve seen old people after the street markets hours trying to find scraps of fruit and vegetables so they have something to eat in the daily.

People need to understand that what is happening in Chile is not only about an increase on the public transport prices. Its so much more than that! But I’ll get there, I promise.

This year we’ve seen news like:

- A 4 month-old baby died because a “loose bullet” was shot God knows where and it broke the roof of a house and hit the kid in the head while he slept on its crib!

-A congressman that wants to enter the senate said “I don’t care if they call me lazy”

-The government wanted to increase the electricity bills by 9.2 percent.

-The robbery of the century: Police embezzlement reaches 26.700.000 million pesos. (36751.55 USD)

-Military forces stole 200 million dollars through the Reserved Copper Law doing duplicated invoices.

-Students in Quinteros closed the scholar year early due to contamination in the air and severe health issues.

We’ve seen collusion in supermarket prices, pharmacies, toilet papers, diapers, military, police and politicians tax evasion... What else do we have to endure?!

(Source in Spanish: Sigrid.pe)

And so the 6th of October of 2019 we wake up to the breaking news: “The government announces the increase of the public transport prices”

With everything I’ve told you already... Wouldn’t you be pissed to hell and back as well?? And I haven’t even told you about how shitty the public health is, how our education system favors the rich and forgets the poor. That our drinkable water is owned by privates, so is the energy and the mineral resources. Our highways belong to Spain... We have to pay money to travel from region to region, and the money doesn’t even stay in the country. This neoliberal model is broke us.

Chile has the most expensive subway rates in Latin America, and this is how it was supposed to be starting the October 6, 2019:

(I did my best at translating)

You can do the math with this numbers two or three times a day at least five days a week... 

The richest 10 percent of the Chilean people have an income 19 times higher than the poorest 10 percent... Here in Chile the parliamentarians earn the highest amounts of net income! The most well paid parliamentarians in Latin America and possibly the world. $9.500.000CLP (13076.39USD).  Look at this numbers, don’t even bother with the position of the politicians, just look at the numbers.

And so, high school students decided to take this upon themselves. The “Evasion” movement began, where thousands of underage students refused to pay to take the subway. This quickly escalated as college students and workers of various areas started to jump over the subway’s validation doors. What started as a passive-aggressive movement took a turn as the Chilean police went to the Subway( METRO) stations and started throwing teargas bombs at our under age students who had nothing to defend themselves with. The subway shut down services.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vd0d7iFZOB8 (You don’t need to know Spanish to understand what’s going on)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8acIrtYbb-c

This sparked a flame sleeping inside every citizen in this country. More and more people started to come out to the streets armed with nothing but cooking pots, pans and wooden spoons. But when the people rises, so does the government. Hundreds of police men went against the protestors. They started throwing teargas bombs at the people, careless of the children, the old, the innocent. Yes, there were people doing dumb shit like robbing shops, but still, many were innocent.

  After 2 or 3 days of violent clashes, of supermarkets being ransacked, of young people being arrested or killed in the streets, the young still stood their ground and kept protesting, kept evading, we kept rising our voices and pots, and the president had his best idea: For the first time since the end of the Pinochet’s dictatorship the Military forces where released onto the streets. Now it wasn’t only police men beating and shooting, it was soldiers. The president declared State of Emergency for the capital Santiago, for two other regions (Valparaíso and Concepción), and he declared those cities to be under curfew. After that, more regions where added to this list: Antofagasta, La Serena/Coquimbo, Valparaíso, Concepción and Santiago all under curfew.

But the biggest catalyst to this was that President Sebastián Piñera said: WE ARE AT WAR.

War... War? It may seem like it (just look at this), but is it really a war when we have pots and wooden spoons, and he has armed soldiers doing coke and other drugs in the streets before going to beat the hell out of people.

We are supposed to be living under a democracy and yet the president decided to pass the torch to General Javier Iturriaga del Campo, the one in charge of the state of emergency. Thanks to that decision we have soldiers and police men following and running people over with their cars, shooting to kill, people are being tortured in subway stations. People are being terrorized as if we where in a dictatorship once again. look at this image and tell me this is justice. Students are disappearing after being arrested. We are under curfew from 8p.m or 10p.m to 6a.m. But what happens to those who have no home to go back to? those who live under bridges? The soldiers beat the crap out of them. Police invading houses to arrest people, there where children there. Soldiers pointing their guns at firemen, firemen in Chile are volunteers, they don’t get paid, soldiers get paid at least $500.000 CLP.  In the last 24 hours the Chilean Army has spent $50 million pesos (68823.15 USD) to buy 56.725 anti-riot ammo. link.

We haven’t had any national transmissions with the president addressing this situation, only conferences. We’ve had congressmen say that games are plotting attacks while they play... Can ya’ll believe this shit?!

The biggest problem in all of this is that national channels censored everything, we where watching videos of soldiers hitting people, running people over, but the tv showed nothing. Just yesterday soldiers attacked a journalist even when he’d showed his safeguard to be on the street after curfew. News were being staged for outside countries: look at this video, the protestants are far away from where the cameras were rolling. Since last night there some sort of campaing to clean the image of the military men, showing them crying, dancing, and doing “silly” stuff with the people. And yes, there might be good cops/soldiers out there, but it does not erase the fact that two girls where raped by soldiers and that they still are killing and abusing people with brute force. Many civilians have plastic bullets in their bodies because soldier are shooting at close ranges. A young man lost an eye today in the morning after hours of surgery.

Many may be asking themselves: Why? Why haven’t they stopped if the president said he wouldn’t increase the public transport price?

Well, as someone said: They took so much from us, they even took our fear. It isn’t about public transport anymore. Its about the inequality of our economic system.

As a generation, from the kids born in the late 90′s to now, we have nothing. Most of us have absolutely nothing to loose but our lives.

We have no money. We can’t find jobs. We don’t have houses or cars. Those who do, either quit college to work or have almost no life because they work and study. Some are renting spaces smaller than tuna cans for the price of a kidney.

We own nothing, everything is under our parents names. People are in debt just to have something to eat. So of course we are not afraid of fighting against a system that favors the rich, a system that allows the already wealthy people to keep stealing what little is left in the pockets of the poor. We are fighting for the old, for the middle aged, for the ones who are yet to come. We don’t want to have children and eventually have to tell them “Find a job. ‘Cuz I can’t pay your education, I’m still paying mine”

Chile needs a change from the very core! we don’t need short term solutions. First of all the the government needs to be changed completely, every single parliamentarian. How much they earn needs to change. and because I read it, the major change that must be made is the constitution of Chile. A constitution that was written in times were the internet and technology was hard to come by, the Chilean constitution has not changed since the 80′s... A time when the dirty laundry of politicians could be easily brushed under the rug. The economic model need to change drastically.

Right now economic classes live segregated from one another. But for the first time in the history of Chile, every region has come together, there are no politic parties in the marches, there are no football teams, there’s no north or south or capitol, it’s just people fighting for their rights, marching to be heard, banging on pots and pans so the lies of the government can’t reach us anymore. Even with all the violence, all the oppression, there’s still hope, there are happy things going on in the protests. Soldiers playing with the protestants.

Please, inform yourselves on this, if you live in a capitalism model of economics, this could happen in your country too. 

Search for these hashtags: #estadodeemergencia #chile #milicos #pacos #carabinerosdechile #evasion #toquedequeda #santiago #laserena #concepcion #antofagasta #valparaiso . watch the videos, share them. Be the our voice outside our frontiers. 

WE ARE CALLING TO A WORLD WIDE MARCH THIS OCTOBER 24  AT 12.pm CHILEAN HOUR. HELP US, A BILLION VOICES UNITED FOR THE RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE.

Feel free to add more videos, more proof.

[etccsy]

By, Issam Khoury

The detention of the Iranian oil tanker in the Strait of Gibraltar early in July 2019, the preventing of providing oil tankers[1] to Iran in ports in compliance with US sanctions, the unified Western media critical discourse of Iran’s policy in the nuclear file, the  economic sanctions on Iranian banks and companies dealing with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the series of sanctions against Hezbollah figures and the banks that deal with this party, and Washington’s decision to end commitment to Iran’s nuclear deal all together have pushed Iran to status of alert and anticipation of a war that will end Iran’s dreams to be a regional significant power in the Middle East .

This series of such sanctions is accompanied by regional changes in the Middle East, the most prominent of which are the following:

1 – Although the UAE army is the most important and effective party in the international coalition against the Houthis in Yemen[2]

It pulled between 70-75% of its troops out from Yemen mid-July 2019 under the pretext of needing to give a platform for political negotiation with the Houthis. Certainly, such a pretext is not convincing, as the UAE military experts are still there training Yemenis against Houthis, just in a smaller amount. UAE withdrawal from Yemen could be intended to mobilize its military and intelligence capabilities towards the east, especially as Iran began the detention of UAE and British ships in the Strait of Hormuz in response to Britain’s detention of the Iranian oil carrier in Gibraltar.

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If the Iranian regime collapsed, the Houthis in Yemen would lose their most prominent allies, and this will be a victory for the UAE and Saudi Arabia. So, the Emirates put its army and intelligence within an international coalition to protect maritime navigation in the Strait of Hormuz. Such an alliance would urge operating power to ensure the safety of ships sailing through the Bab al-Mandab Strait where Houthi – and the Iranians behind – play a significant role in threatening the marine navigation.

2- Strengthening Gulf – Israeli relations:

GCC-Israeli relations have witnessed diplomatic courtship starting with the participation of an Israeli sport team in Abu Dhabi in the end of October 2018[3], reaching the climax of relations when a peace meeting between Israelis and Arabs was organized in Bahrain ” Manama ” on 25-26 June 2019, sponsored by Kouchner[4], the son-in-law of US President, through the so-called Century Deal.

Israeli sports team/ Abu Dhabi / 2018

Whether there is peace between Arab gulf countries and Israel or not, both the gulf and the Israeli sides have an interest in reducing Iranian influence in the Middle East. This mutual interest may allow the Israelis to use the Gulf airspace to protect global maritime navigation and prevent the Iranian threat to the global economy.

3 – The British Conservative Party and Iran:

The British have always been considered the policy engineers for the Middle East. And, after the departure of Prime Minister Mai from power and Boris Johnson assumed his position as the new prime minister, Johnson launched tough criticism against the leader of the opposition Labor Party, Jeremy Corbyn, in front of the members of the House of Commons on 25th of July, 2019, accusing him of befriending the mullahs of Iran and taking a stand against the interests of the British Kingdom in its alliance with the United States[5] .

Johnson is known for his outright hostility to the Islamic Republic of Iran and for his respect for the Republican Party of the US. Before issuing this indictment, a British minesweeper had arrived at the Gulf waters. This move from the British was made in case the Iranians decided to deploy marine mines freely to close Strait of Hormuz, to negotiate with the Americans not to bomb them.

 4- Raids of Israelis air on Syria and Iraq:

The policy of retaining the right to respond, that has been so long echoed by the army commander of the armed forces, Bashar al – Assad, after each Israeli strike on Syrian territory did not stop Israel from proceeding to bombard the vital spots of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Syria. Israel’s next move occurred on 18th July/ 2019 when it bombed sites of the Popular Mob in the province of Salah al-Din[6].

5 – The new US bases in Iraq:

The Iraqi News Channel “Al Iraqiah” reported on Sunday, 6 January 2019 the intention of Washington to set three new US bases as follows:

The first base will be in the Baiji district inside the Chinese base near the refinery headquarters of the former brigade 14. 

The second base will be in the Fatha area, named ” second regiment” previously.

The third base will be located in (K 1) in Kirkuk province.

Of course, this approach from Washington shows the concern of the Pentagon and the US oil companies to strengthen their presence in the Middle East to fight terrorism first and to protect American interests in Iraq second.

The decrease of US military presence in Iraq during Obama’s administration has led to the growing influence of Iran there and also of the religious parties backed by Tehran mullahs in parliament and in the Iraqi government.

6 – The resuming of training of the Syrian opposition of the Al-Tanf[7] who are supported by Washington on May 2019, after that training has been suspended on 2017.

Iran’s actual power:

The Iranian regime is a totalitarian religious system, and its military power is concentrated in the following axes:

1- Ballistic missiles[8]:

Iran launched a ballistic missile on July 26, 2019, with a range of 1,000 km, with the intention to tell the international force that it possesses deterrent force in the event of an attack. However, Iran’s missile arsenal is small in the face of the military force that is watching Iran, be it USA or Israel, where Netanyahu recently announced on Sunday, 28 July 2019, in front of his government, his country ‘s success in cooperation with Washington on the test of  Arrow 3 System for air defense through experiments conducted in the state of Alaska[9] . This system is capable of destroying ballistic missiles outside the atmosphere, Netanyahu said: “Today Israel has the capabilities to act against ballistic missiles launched at us from Iran and from anywhere else. All our foes should know that we can best them, both defensively and offensively[10].”

And, it is certain that Russia will not support Iran in this regard. It may employ (The S-400 Triumph) deployed in Syria to protect Israel from Iranian missiles under the pretext of protecting Jewish civilians. Moscow, in spite of its cooperation with Tehran in Syria, is a reliable partner for the Israelis. The shared capital of Zionists in Russia is large and makes Israel an effective State in the Kremlin.

Photo: The USS Devastator, a Navy minesweeper, is pulled into position as it arrives in Bahrain in 2012. (Jayme Pastoric/U.S. Navy)

2 – A naval mine:

Iran is certainly capable of closing the Strait of Hormuz through the dissemination of naval mines[11], and this presents a very complex situation since no country with a minesweeper can conduct a thorough sweep of the Arabian/ Persian Gulf. But, if the war against Iran breaks out, all commercial ships will leave the Arabian Gulf, and with such departure, it may take three months to secure shipping in this Gulf, which will be according to one of the following two scenarios:

The first: punitive airstrikes on Iran, resulting in political negotiations. One of its most prominent outputs would be that Iran removes its naval mine and remove its ballistic missiles off the west coast of the Arabian / Persian Gulf.

Second: launching a comprehensive war aiming at overthrowing the Iranian regime, and, if such thing happened, the new leaders in Tehran would force the defeated military leaders to disclose the mine maps and where they are deployed. That may make the new Tehran government, backed by the US and other western countries, pay the cost of war against Iran and the cost of demining conducted by international demining companies.

“We are eager to operate if called upon,” the officer aboard one of the Persian Gulf ships said. “We’ll operate the systems as best as they can operate. My concern is the ships are old and, like any old ship, they break.”

The Avenger-class ships were built in the late 1980s and early ’90s and slated for retirement years ago. But their retirement date has been continually delayed because the service still doesn’t have a working replacement. The Navy’s latest estimate is that the ships will all be decommissioned by fiscal year 2023.[12]

3 – Sectarian militias and suicide bombers  

Iran ‘s revolutionary guards and specifically Qods Force managed to train thousands of sectarian Shiites in order to form multiple battalions ( like  Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iraq, Liwa Fatemiyoun[13], Popular Mobilization Forces[14], Houthi movement[15], Liwa al-Imam al-Hussein[16]..) and also contributed to the training of Sunni jihadist radicals such as  (Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine[17], Hamas[18], Mumtaz Dughmush Group [19]).

This sectarian radical force is inspired by sectarian ideology to hate Americans and Israelis, so it is very easy to recruit such fighters to carry out suicide attacks on American bases in the Middle East; and, certainly these suicide operations will not be in the Arabian Gulf but will be in Iraq and Syria, specifically the Al-Tanf base, near the areas under the influence of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC. (

The Al-Tanf Base[20] may be the most exposed area for such operations if the Iranian Revolutionary Guard decides to carry them out. In the north-east of Syria and Kurdistan of Iraq, there are many defensive points by the People’s Protection Units[21], and the Peshmerga[22] forces which would impede the arrival of these suicide bombers to areas of US military concentration; but, in Al-Tanf area, the Syrian opposition does not have such a large presence.

The number of civilians at al-Rukban camp[23], which is adjacent to the Al-Tanf base, is less than 40,000, and the Syrian militias loyal to Washington in that region are limited to the Eastern Lions, Free Army of the Clans, Martyr Ahmed al-‘Abdu” – all of who are residents from al- Rukban camp. Washington acknowledges this risk, prompting it to retrain and arm the militia in early May 2019, after they had suspended its project in supporting and arming the Syrian opposition in July 2017.

Survey Predictions:

Americans are not in a hurry to declare war against Iran, and the best time for announcing it would be in spring or summer next year, when such a war may be a good leverage point for President Trump to use in the 2020 elections. Leveraging this war will bring him backing from all the pro-Israeli lobby research centers in Washington, in addition to arms and oil companies. We now see Trump’s tweets on social media focused on criticizing Iran ‘s regime and on possibly reforming the US’s relationship with Tehran if Tehran first agrees to changes in the nuclear deal. His tweets also discuss demanding rich countries such as ( Saudi Arabia, Japan, and China) to provide financial support for the US Army, which will protect navigation in the Arabian/ Persian Gulf. This will make it that the cost of the war will not be paid by the USA but by those countries which will participate in the International Coalition to Protect Maritime Navigation.

US sent 1500 solders to Syria in the Memorial Day , Directed by, Issam Khoury NEW YORK – 2019

Iran, in turn, has realized that Washington will not act alone against it and is establishing an international coalition that will take several months; this will be dangerous and possibly even a repeat of what happened to Iraq in 2003. Tehran, in anticipation to the possible collective action against it, is provoking Washington and Britain to carry out limited punitive strikes against it so that Washington will retaliate on a small level only: and then no further, larger-scale action will be taken against Iran.

As the plan of the Iranians seems to be exposed to Washington, Washington will not be dragged into a limited war with Tehran. The demands of Washington for Republicans are high:

1.  Tehran renounces its nuclear program.

2.  Iran abandons the development of its ballistic missile program.

3.  Tehran stops supporting radical religious militias throughout the Middle East.

Of course, these demands mean, in short, the suspension of Iran’s program to export the Iranian Islamic revolution outside Iran. It also means the end of years of efforts of the Iranian government, which is impossible to accept by Qom’s Sheikhs and the Supreme Leader of the Iranian Revolution, as well as by the Conservative Party and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards there. So, Iran will most likely not comply with Washington’s demands, which will push the latter to begin a major war that will end the Tehran regime and bring a democratic government to Iran.

Syria-Iranian protest front UN in NY, Sep 20.2016, with around 2,000 demonstrators/ Directed by, Issam Khoury

Washington and Europe today have a reasonable and organized alternative to the Iranian opposition: (The National Council of Iranian Resistance[24] ) , whose most significant pillar is the People’s Mujahedin of Iran[25]. The People’s Mujahedin of Iran is active in organizing frequent demonstrations against Iran throughout the world after they were cleared of terrorism in Europe in September 2011, and also the USA cleared them in  September 2012.

Translator: NAHID ALSAYED SULEIMAN

Editing and proofreading by, Issam Khoury, Joseph Shahem

[1] A tanker is a ship designed to transport or store liquids or gases in bulk. Major types of tankship include the oil tanker, the chemical tanker, and gas carrier.

[2] The United Arab Emirates sent at least 5,000 troops to Yemen to train and lead a mélange of pro-government troops and militias, have wanted out for some time now. They say the United Arab Emirates has sharply cut its deployment of men, attack helicopters and heavy guns around the Red Sea port of Hudaydah, the main battleground last year. A shaky United Nations-mediated cease-fire in Hudaydah that came into effect last December provided the excuse and a reason to pull back.  (Follow the Emiratis’ Lead, Out of Yemen/ NY-Times/ July 15, 2019).

[3] Flying own flag, three Israelis win bronze at Abu Dhabi judo tourney/ The Times of Israel/ 28 October 2018.

[4] Bahrain conference showcases Israeli ties with Gulf states

Read more: https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2019/06/israel-gulf-states-bahrain-saudi-arabia-iran-palestinians.html#ixzz5vqrYPeBo

[5]https://iranintl.com/ar/%D8%A5%D9%8A%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86/%D8%A8%D9%88%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%B3-%D8%AC%D9%88%D9%86%D8%B3%D9%88%D9%86-%D9%8A%D8%AA%D9%87%D9%85-%D8%B1%D8%A6%D9%8A%D8%B3-%D8%AD%D8%B2%D8%A8-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B9%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%84-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A8%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%B7%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%8A-%D8%A8%D9%80%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA%D8%A8%D8%B9%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D9%84%D9%85%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%8A-%D8%A5%D9%8A%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86

[6] https://aawsat.com/home/article/1821021/%D9%82%D8%B5%D9%81-%D9%85%D8%B9%D8%B3%D9%83%D8%B1-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AD%D8%B4%D8%AF-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B4%D8%B9%D8%A8%D9%8A-%D9%81%D9%8A-%D8%B4%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%84-%D8%A8%D8%BA%D8%AF%D8%A7%D8%AF

[7] Al-Tanf, also known as “At Tanf”, is a United States military base in Syria’s Homs Governorate located 24 km west of the al-Tanf border crossing in the Syrian Desert

[8] While Iran has not yet tested or deployed a missile capable of striking the United States, it continues to hone longer-range missile technologies under the auspices of its space-launch program. In addition to increasing the quantity of its missile arsenal, Iran is investing in qualitative improvements to its missiles’ accuracy and lethality. Iran has also become a center for missile proliferation, supplying proxies such as Hezbollah and Syria’s al-Assad regime with a steady supply of missiles and rockets, as well as local production capability. https://missilethreat.csis.org/country/iran/

[9] Arrow-3 missiles successfully took out target missiles in high-altitude, hit-to-kill test engagements conducted at the Pacific Spaceport Complex-Alaska in Kodiak. The tests were a joint effort between the Israel Missile Defense Organization of the Directorate of Defense Research and Development and the U.S. Missile Defense Agency. https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2019/07/28/us-israels-arrow-3-missile-put-to-the-test-in-alaska/

[10] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-usa-missiles/israel-says-arrow-3-missile-shield-passes-us-trials-warns-iran-idUSKCN1UN088

[11] A naval mine is a self-contained explosive device placed in water to damage or destroy surface ships or submarines. Unlike depth charges, mines are deposited and left to wait until they are triggered by the approach of, or contact with, any vessel.

[12] https://www.propublica.org/article/iran-has-hundreds-of-naval-mines-us-navy-minesweepers-find-old-dishwashers-car-parts

[13] Liwa Fatemiyoun, literally “Fatimid Banner”, also known as Fatemiyoun Division, Fatemiyoun Brigade, or Hezbollah Afghanistan, is an Afghan Shia militia formed in 2014 to fight in Syria on the side of the government

[14] The Popular Mobilization Forces, also known as the People’s Mobilization Committee and the Popular Mobilization Units, is an Iraqi state-sponsored umbrella organization composed of some 40 militias that are mostly Shia Muslim groups.

[15] The Houthi movement, officially called Ansar Allah, is an Islamic religious-political-armed movement that emerged from Sa’dah in northern Yemen in the 1990s. They are of the Zaidi sect.

[16] Liwa al-Imam al-Hussein (The Imam Hussein Brigade) is an Iraqi Shi’a militia primarily operating in the Damascus area, working under the narrative of defending the Sayyida Zainab shrine. It has most notably been a participant in a regime offensive on the East Ghouta locality of al-Mleha (a focal point of Sunni rebel activity), coordinating with other Iraqi Shi’a militias such as Liwa Assad Allah al-Ghalib. Ideologically, Liwa al-Imam al-Hussein asserts affinity with Muqtada al-Sadr.

[17] The Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine known in the West as simply Palestinian Islamic Jihad, is a Palestinian Islamist organization formed in 1981 whose objective is the destruction of the State of Israel and the establishment of a sovereign.

[18] Hamas is a Palestinian Sunni-Islamist fundamentalist organization. It has a social service wing, Dawah, and a military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. It has been the de facto governing authority of the Gaza Strip since its takeover of that area in 2007. During this period it fought several wars with Israel

[19] Mumtaz Dughmush (also spelled Durmush) is the leader of the Salafi-jihadi group Jaysh al-Islam in Gaza, and a member of the large Dughmush clan. According to journalist Donald Macintyre, “during the 1990s he had been a member of the PA Preventative Security Organisation headed by Mohammed Dahlan, but during the [Second] Intifada he joined Jamal Abu Samhadana to form the militant Popular Resistance Committees. After the 2006 elections, Dughmush, whose militia was now operating autonomously…joined with the PRC and Hamas’s Qassam Brigades to capture [Israeli soldier] Gilad Shalit, and defied the Islamic faction’s authority, by kidnapping the two Fox News journalists. https://www.ecfr.eu/mapping_palestinian_politics/detail/mumtaz_durmush.

[20] Al-Tanf, also known as “At Tanf”, is a United States military base in Syria’s Homs Governorate located 24 km west of the al-Tanf border crossing in the Syrian Desert. The surrounding deconfliction zone is located along the Iraq and Jordan–Syria border

[21] The People’s Protection Units or People’s Defense Units is a mainly-Kurdish militia in Syria and the primary component of the Syrian Democratic Forces. The YPG is mostly ethnically Kurdish.

[22] Peshmerga, the military forces of the autonomous region of Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Since the Iraqi Army is forbidden by Iraqi law to enter Kurdistan Region, the Peshmerga, along with their security subsidiaries, are responsible for the security of the regions in Iraqi Kurdistan.

[23] Rukban, sometimes transliterated Rakban, Arabic (الرُّكبان) or (الرُّقبان) is an arid remote area on the Syrian border with the near the extreme northeast of Jordan, close to the joint borders with Syria and Iraq. The area became a refugee camp for Syrians in 2014

[24] The National Council of Resistance of Iran is an Iranian political organization based in France.

[25] The People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, or the Mojahedin-e Khalq, is an Iranian political organization based on Islamic and socialist ideology. It advocates overthrowing the Islamic Republic of Iran leadership and installing its own government.

The Next Gulf War By, Issam Khoury The detention of the Iranian oil tanker in the Strait of Gibraltar early in July 2019, the preventing of providing oil tankers…