Dear Friend,
Palestine has erupted in protest against the U.S. President Donald Trump announced plan on Palestine. Tens of thousands of Palestinians took to the streets to protest Trump’s proposal. The plan is a sellout of the Palestine people, as the Palestine President Mahmoud Abbas has said.
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Protests in Palestine against U.S. plan
by Countercurrents Collective
Palestine has erupted in protest against the U.S. President Donald
Trump announced plan on Palestine. Tens of thousands of Palestinians took to the streets to protest Trump’s proposal. The plan is a sellout of the Palestine people, as the Palestine President Mahmoud Abbas has told.
Palestine has erupted in protest against the U.S. President Donald Trump announced plan on Palestine. Tens of thousands of Palestinians took to the streets to protest Trump’s proposal. The plan is a sellout of the Palestine people, as the Palestine President Mahmoud Abbas has told.
Gaza
Thousands of Palestinians in Gaza Strip observed a general strike on Wednesday. All the shops were shut down, while government and financial institutions did not open to business, and schools and universities suspended classes.
This came less than a day after a massive rally in front of the headquarters of the UN agency responsible for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, in Gaza City in protest of the plan.
Protestors burnt tires and pictures of Trump and Israeli Prime Benjamin Netanyahu, and raised a banner reading, “Palestine is not for sale”.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians also rallied on Tuesday evening in the besieged Gaza Strip and in the West Bank, to protest against the announcement of the U.S. “peace plan”, known as “deal of the century”.
West Bank
Similar protests were reported elsewhere in the West Bank on Tuesday.
Lebanon
A general strike was also observed in the Palestinian refugee camps across Lebanon in protest of the Trump-plan.
Palestinian refugees marched in Ein al-Hilweh and Beddawi refugee camps, shouting slogans decrying the plan as “a war waged against their inalienable national rights”, particularly their right to return to their hometowns from which their families were expelled during the founding of Israel in 1948.
Protesters outside the U.S. embassy in Amman. (Photo: via Twitter)
Amman
Dozens of protesters gathered outside the US embassy in Amman, shouting slogans against normalization.
Journalists
The General Federation of Arab Journalists strongly condemned the U.S., calling on Arab governments to unite against U.S.-Israeli attempts aimed at canceling out Palestinian rights.
Palestinian leaders call for unity, dialogue
Palestinian citizens of Jerusalem call for unity to face the ‘Deal of the Century’. (Photo: via Twitter)
Palestinian officials accused Washington of attempting “to cancel” the Palestinian cause.
The Palestinian leaders say that “they were not invited to Washington and that no peace plan can work without them”, Reuters reported.
According to the Palestinian news source Al Watan Voice, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has already started its own diplomatic action to counter the so-called U.S. peace plan.
PA Minister of Foreign Affairs, Riyad al-Maliki, announced during a meeting with the Egyptian Ambassador to the occupied territories on Sunday, that the PA leadership is discussing measures to respond to the U.S plan together with other Arab States.
Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told AFP that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) reserved the right “to withdraw from the interim agreement” of the Oslo Accords, signed in 1993.
Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of the Palestinian movement Hamas, reiterated on Sunday that his movement is ready to meet with the Fatah leadership and all other Palestinian political groups in Cairo to resume the ongoing dialogue.
We must “unite, draw our pathway and take the lead ahead of defending our Jerusalem and our dignity,” Haniyeh said as quoted in the Middle East Monitor.
“Dustbin of History”
Leaders and governments around the world reacted to US President Donald Trump’s announcement on Tuesday of his long-awaited Middle East plan, dubbed ‘Deal of the Century’.
The Palestinian leadership, which cut its diplomatic ties with Washington following Trump’s unilateral recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in December 2017, immediately rejected the plan.
Palestinian Authority President Abbas said that the so-called Deal of the Century “belongs to the dustbin of history”.
Abbas also called on all Palestinian political groups to meet in order to discuss the American announcement, obtaining an immediate positive response from the Islamic Jihad and Hamas movements.
Turkey: “Never acceptable”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday that Trump’s plan for peace in the Middle East is “never acceptable.”
Erdogan declared that Trump’s plan ignores Palestinians’ rights and attempts to legitimize the Isreali occupation, Anadolu news agency reported.
“Jerusalem is sacred for Muslims and Trump’s so-called peace plan proposing to leave Jerusalem to Israel is never acceptable,” Erdogan said.
Iran: “Treason of the Century”
Iranian officials described Trump’s plan as a “plan of imposition and sanctions”.
Iran’s foreign ministry said in a statement: “The shameful peace plan imposed by America on the Palestinians is the treason of the century and doomed to fail.”
Hezbollah: “Deal of Shame”
The Lebanese Resistance group Hezbollah, on the other hand, rejected the latest American initiative, describing it as a ‘Deal of Shame’.
A Jordanian warning
The Jordanian government rejected what it described as “annexation of Palestinian lands,” with the Kingdom’s foreign minister warning against the “dangerous consequences of unilateral Israeli measures that aim to impose new realities on the ground.”
Egypt welcomes U.S. efforts
Egypt has welcomed the U.S. efforts to try to resolve the ‘conflict’.
Saudi assurances
Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud reportedly called the Palestinian President, Wednesday, to reiterate that the position of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia regarding the rights of the Palestinian people remains unchanged.
Abbas has reportedly also received a message of solidarity from his Lebanese counterpart Michel Aoun.
“We are with you and support any position that you might take to defend your rights,” Aoun told Abbas, reported the Palestinian News agency WAFA.
U.S. Democrats: “Shameful and disingenuous”
Democratic members of the U.S. Congress denounced Trump’s initiative.
Senator and Democratic candidate, Bernie Sanders, said, “any acceptable peace deal must be consistent with international law and multiple UN Security Council resolutions.”
UK: A “positive step”
A spokesperson for British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s office said the plan could be “a positive step forward”.
UN: Committed to Two-State solution
Stephane Dujarric, the spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, said that the UN remains committed to “the vision of two States – Israel and Palestine – living side by side in peace and security within recognized borders, on the basis of the pre-1967 lines.”
The U.S. plan: “There shall be no right of return”
Palestinians stage a protest against the “Deal of the Century”. (Photo: via Twitter)
The U.S plan consists of possible political scenarios and details an economic proposal that Washington had already introduced last July, during a conference in Manama, Bahrain.
The economic plan vowed to set up a $50 billion fund to help revive the Palestinian economy, with Jordan, Egypt, and Israel also receiving shares of the proposed financial aid.
However, media reports indicate that little funding has been pledged so far to turn the Bahrain plan into action.
Trump’s Washington announcement is considered the political component of what has largely been termed as “Deal of the Century”.
“Yes” to settlements
According to the plan, the U.S. will officially recognize Israel’s illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.
Trump has further indicated that Israel would also have control over all “security-related matters” in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The plan said:
“(Israel) will not have to uproot any settlements, and will incorporate the vast majority of Israeli settlements into contiguous Israeli territory. Israeli enclaves located inside contiguous Palestinian territory will become part of the State of Israel and be connected to it through an effective transportation system.”
“No” to Palestinian state
Although Trump’s plan refers to the creation of a Palestinian state, it imposes “limitations of certain sovereign powers in the Palestinian areas (…) such as maintenance of Israeli security responsibility and Israeli control of the airspace west of the Jordan river.”
The ill-defined Palestinian State is itself conditioned on the Palestinian leadership meeting a number of conditions.
Jerusalem for Israel only
The plan refers to Israel, “unlike many previous powers that had ruled Jerusalem, and had destroyed the holy sites of other faiths,” as a “good custodian of Jerusalem.”
“The State of Israel is to be commended for safeguarding the religious sites of all and maintaining a religious status quo,” the document added.
The U.S. plan envisions Jerusalem as the “undivided” capital of Israel, as already declared by the Trump administration on December 6, 2017.
The plan, however, proposes to get Palestinians limited sovereignty over few neighborhoods adjacent to the Israeli separation wall built illegally in occupied Palestinian East Jerusalem:
“The sovereign capital of the State of Palestine should be in the section of East Jerusalem located in all areas east and north of the existing security barrier, including Kafr Aqab, the eastern part of Shuafat and Abu Dis, and could be named Al Quds or another name as determined by the State of Palestine.”
No “siege” on Gaza
The document states that the people of Gaza “have suffered for too long under the repressive rule of Hamas”.
There was no single reference in all 80 pages to the 14-year-old Israeli siege on Gaza.
For Gaza to be included in any future peace agreement, it would have to be demilitarized and fall under the control of the Palestinian Authority or any other party that is recognized by Israel.
Refugees
“There shall be no right of return by, or absorption of, any Palestinian refugee into the State of Israel,” the plan stipulates.
What is described as the “refugee problem” should be solved by Palestine’s “Arab brothers,” who “have the moral responsibility to integrate them into their countries as the Jews were integrated into the State of Israel.”
The deal of the century is a project for more wars
by Dr Salim Nazzal
Trump’s plan finds its roots, as President Muhammad Abbas said as a continuation of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 when Britain considered the Jewish majority in Palestine as a nation while depriving the majority of the indigenous people of the right to self-determination.
Trump’s ‘deal of the century’ won’t bring peace – that was the plan
by Jonathan Cook
The so-called “Vision for Peace” unveiled on Tuesday simply confirmed that the US government has publicly adopted the long-running
consensus in Israel: that it is entitled to keep permanently the swaths of territory it seized illegally over the past half-century that deny the Palestinians any hope of a state.
Rebecca Vilkomerson of JVP, can we talk?
by Rima Najjar
I have to ask — of them and of all such Jewish “progressives”, who hold “diverse opinions” regarding the origins of and solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — I have to ask, why are they so hell-bent on looking for “solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” rather than being in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for justice and liberation in Palestine?
Jewish Groups, like J Street, are being called “progressive” as in a Newsweek headline in connection with the so-called “Deal of the Century”, when they “Dismiss Trump’s Middle East Peace Plan As ‘Utterly Bankrupt’ and a ‘Sham’”.
I have to ask — of them and of all such Jewish “progressives”, who hold “diverse opinions” regarding the origins of and solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — I have to ask, why are they so hell-bent on looking for “solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” rather than being in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for justice and liberation in Palestine?
The news that Rebecca Vilkomerson, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) executive director and founder, is living with a husband who works for Check Point, an Israeli cybersecurity company that makes monitoring software and should at least be as high as HP on anyone’s boycott list, has hit me hard, coming as it did on the eve of the grand announcement of the plan Trump hatched and is implementing with Israel’s far-right government. Trump’s plan aims to formalize Israel’s apartheid rule over the Palestinian people. It is, according to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement, “the final nail in the coffin of the moribund ‘peace process’, making #BDS the most effective response”. Trump’s ‘deal of the century’ has been rejected by the UN, which reiterated that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be solved based on UN resolutions and international law, and by Palestinian rights activists in the region and abroad.
I was deeply shocked by the news regarding JVP’s executive director and founder, because, despite everything, I trusted Rebecca and JVP to do the right thing. To me, the matter is one of personal integrity. I am not saying she had to divorce her husband. I am saying she had a responsibility, both ethical and professional, to air out the political differences between herself and her husband, if they existed, publicly in a principled manner. But maybe that would have been impossible, given the ambiguous nature historically of JVP’s support for Palestine. Or maybe there was no political tension in the marriage, only hypocrisy.
Rebecca, you have stated publicly that, “The state of Israel is not the same as the Jewish people”, and avowed your and JVP’s anti-Zionism. Why, then, is your husband working in an Israeli company that profits from the incubator provided by the Israeli state’s repression of Palestinians? It’s because so many of JVP’s supporters stand behind Israel as a Jewish state. So, I have to ask, as my friend Lena Bloch does:
Why must ‘Jewish’ self-determination be so radically different from all other peoples’ self-determination, why should ‘Jewish’ self-determination be done on other people’s land, by means of settler-colonialism, by military subjugation, by ethnic cleansing, by expulsion and replacement of already existing population? Why must ‘Jewish’ self-determination have a precondition of denying self-determination to anyone else in the same region?
When I say I trusted JVP “despite everything”, I am referring to the agonizingly long wait we Palestinians have had to endure before JVP officially rejected Zionism, condemned Israel’s Zionist settler-colonial regime and embraced BDS. It is Zionist Jews who have created Zionism and Israel for their purposes (the non-Jewish world has simply adapted to their initiatives), and it has always been my hope and belief that non-Zionist American Jews are best positioned to help get Palestinians out of the nightmare into which Zionism has plunged us since the creation of the Jewish State in 1948.
So can we talk, please Rebecca? Public debate on Israel today is finally opening up issues that go to the heart of Israel’s legitimacy, its Zionist ideology and constitution as a Jewish state and, by extension, issues that are central to Palestine’s liberation. It is my hope that you will now be completely open and honest about such issues that so clearly still have to do with “Jewish identity”. JVP’s site says that they seek “security and self-determination for Israelis.” My point in challenging Rebecca is to make her address, in her public capacity, the question of the Zionist Jewish identity politics that is obstructing liberation in Palestine.
Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank
Has The International Medical Establishment Learnt Anything At All From Management Of Past Epidemics? If So, Why This Panic Evacuation From China?
in World
by Dr P S Sahni
Going by the track record the political establishment will have its way world wide and medical establishment will keep its mouth shut just as it did during the Nazi regime! The evacuation process would continue unabated. The irony is that Indian government wants to evacuate large number of Indian medical students studying there; in fact their services should be utilised in Wuhan during the ongoing epidemic.
“The study of the evolution of disease patterns provides evidence that during the last century doctors have affected epidemics no more profoundly than did priests during earlier times. Epidemics came and went, imprecated by both but touched by neither. They are not modified any more decisively by the rituals performed in medical clinics than by those customary at religious shrines. Discussion of the future of health care might usefully begin with the recognition of this fact.”
– Ivan Illich, Limits to Medicine, Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health, 1974
The epicentre of the coronavirus epidemic in China is Wuhan, a city of eleven million people. All that needs to be done has already been done by the Chinese authorities – at the level of medical, political, military establishments. The measures adopted are so simple that you don’t need facilities ordinarily available in the best of the hospital anywhere in the world. This is a moment of reckoning for all the allopathic medical doctors, their associations and the government medical structure all over the world to stand up and take a stance that no evacuations are needed from Wuhan. This simple principle is taught in third year MBBS studies in medical colleges all over the world. Why is the medical establishment participating in a panic reaction?
The politicians have a reason to be seen to be doing something for the respective citizens of their countries in a show of aggressive nationalism. This stance of politicians does not have an iota of scientificity. Why is this not being opposed by WHO? True the WHO will say that it is not a super national government. But it could at least hourly issue the advice that evacuation from Wuhan should not be undertaken. As of now only the Chinese authorities are seen to be working with a scientific temper. Even within the area of epicentre what people need to be doing is wearing a mask and washing hands with soap as and when necessary. The suspected source of the virus viz flesh of exotic animals and birds has already been taken care of by municipalities in Wuhan province.
I worked during the cholera epidemic in 1971 at the Indo-Bangla border as volunteer medico for three months; as also during the national smallpox eradication program in Bihar in 1974 for three months under a WHO program. Also as part of a team I worked in Delhi during the cholera epidemic of 1988 and brought out a document titled “Crime Goes Unpunished”; around 1500 people had died in that epidemic.
I was member of ABVA, the first voluntary group in India which worked on the AIDS epidemic head on in 1988. I have the basic principles of managing epidemics very clear in my mind. In fact the best time to show how unscientific the medical establishment behaves is when it deals with a fresh epidemic and that time is now when the unprecedented panic reaction is being witnessed wherein the most developed nations are evacuating their citizens from Wuhan.
For instance why is the CDC, Atlanta not telling the Trump administration not to indulge in this buffoonery. Were it not the tragedy accompanying the epidemic one would have said that the white coated medical professionals outside China are colluding in the comical opera staged by third rate politicians whose sole aim – with an eye on the next election – is to create an illusion amongst the masses that they are bringing their citizens back to their homeland rescuing them from the from the jaws of death. This is absolute bullshit.
Going by the track record the political establishment will have its way world wide and medical establishment will keep its mouth shut just as it did during the Nazi regime! The evacuation process would continue unabated. The irony is that Indian government wants to evacuate large number of Indian medical students studying there; in fact their services should be utilised in Wuhan during the ongoing epidemic.
[Dr. P.S. Sahni is an Orthopaedic Surgeon and a member of PIL Watch Group & AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan. Email: pilwatchgroup@gmail.com]
It Is Easy to Overreact to the Chinese Coronavirus
by Gail Tverberg
The possible economic impact of Coronavirus
People Power Humbles Modi, Shah
by Aijaz Zaka Syed
Modi and Amit Shah would ignore the lessons of history at their own peril
The Anti-CAA/NRC/NPR Movement: Hope and Prospects
by Dr Prem Singh
Due to the upcoming assembly elections in Delhi, the political parties have a particular interest in the anti-CAA/NRC/NPR movement. The BJP is trying to make it in its favor by propagating that it is a movement of the Muslims only. It sees the movement of Shaheen Bagh as beneficial for polarization of Hindu votes in its favour. The ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Delhi state has not categorically opposed the CAA/NRC/NPR saying that Hindus are also involved in the movement. It has made this strategy to confuse both Hindus and Muslims.
How Hindutva Terror Outfits Hide in Plain Sight
by Subhash Gatade
The arrest of yet another alleged bomb-maker with right-wing links should lead to action at last.
Venezuela, January 2020: Hardship and
resistance
by Peter Lackowski
This January I went to Venezuela with a group of North Americans to see for ourselves how economic “sanctions” are affecting people’s access to food. We wondered how the Venezuelan popular classes are responding to the massive attack on their economic well-being.
This January I went to Venezuela with a group of North Americans to see for ourselves how economic “sanctions” are affecting people’s access to food. We wondered how the Venezuelan popular classes are responding to the massive attack on their economic well-being.
We saw a complicated scene, with virtually every kind of productive activity crippled in many ways, some not so obvious on the surface. Nevertheless, people have had time to adjust to the situation; they have been creative, energetic, and determined. Communes are growing, the government is surviving, and “It’s not as bad as it was in 2017” was a common refrain. These are some of the stories we heard as we met people working to achieve food sovereignty for their country.
The biggest problem, getting adequate food to the majority of people, is the same as it is all around the world: food production and distribution is still done mostly through a capitalist system. Venezuela is governed by a socialist party, which has socialism as its goal. But the capitalist sector controls an estimated 80% of the economy; the government’s share is mostly in oil and some heavy industry. Stores and restaurants are well stocked with food, but the price is too high for most people to easily afford. Up to last year, there was a system by which the government controlled the prices that merchants could charge, selling dollars at a discount to importers, in order to make low retail prices possible. Massive corruption on the part of the importers and others made that system unsustainable, and once the economic war ramped up it collapsed, since the government bank had no more dollars to sell.
The government’s response was to set up an alternative system to eliminate at least some of the middlemen whose scarcity-based profits were making food unaffordable.
Food is acquired in quantity by the government, and packages of basic things like rice, lentils, beans, tuna, cooking oil, pasta, corn flour, sugar and milk are assembled. These are distributed through committees set up by communal councils, which are made up of about 200 households in a neighborhood (fewer in rural areas.) Recipients pay a nominal price of about 50 cents. This system is called CLAP (Committees for Local Supply and Production).
We encountered places where packages don’t come regularly, some not at all, and at times, certain items are missing. We were told that Mérida and Zulia in the west are examples of places experiencing serious hunger. Nevertheless, CLAP has saved many lives; about 6 million households depend on it, 60% of the population.
The Bolivarian volunteer militia has been put in charge of distribution of the food, but the government still has to rely on commercial channels to obtain the products. The US strategy of economic war includes making it nearly impossible for Venezuela to do business with the capitalist world. Big Venezuelan corporations like Polar control much of the food business. These are serious obstacles, but the program continues.
Altos de Lídice school. Photo: Peter Lackowski
Schools, factories, universities and other institutions have facilities that provide meals. Many communes operate a system to feed people. Our group visited one far up a steep hillside in Caracas, Altos de Lídice. In areas of elevated poverty and malnutrition casas de alimentación — food houses — are established. Householders are found who are willing to run a facility that can provide cooked meals for up to 200 people. The government provides funds to upgrade their kitchen with appropriate equipment. Food is supplied partly by the government and partly by the commune, and the team of cooks are paid for their work.
Altos de Lídice Pharmacy. Photo: Peter Lackowski
The commune has the responsibility of running these kitchens, including strict accounting: the books are open to the community, to eliminate corruption. This transparency is fundamental to all communal enterprises. In Altos de Lídice we saw their pharmacy, a sewing business, and other productive projects. Community members participate in keeping the books as well as doing the work.
Sweet potato harvest, Yaracuy. Photo: Peter Lackowski
Eliminating the profits that capitalist intermediaries in the food chain extract is a big part of the solution. There are farmers’ markets, direct links between rural and urban communities, and arrangements by which consumers advance money to farmers to provide them with the capital they need (similar to CSA’s — community supported agriculture — in the US.) But many of the most productive agricultural areas are far from urban centers.
Spare parts for trucks and cars are often impossible to obtain, and many are out of commission. Altos de Lídice is one of many communities that have had to deal with a shortage of trash compacting trucks. Chemicals essential in refining crude oil into gasoline are no longer available from the US, which has led to a fuel shortage. These things make transportation a serious problem in the food supply. Many farmers who would prefer to sell their products directly to consumers have no option; they have to sell them to merchants.
Fishing boat, Chuao. photo: Peter Lackowski
Soon after Chávez became president, trawling by giant factory ships was banned within Venezuelan waters. The ecology of the sea floor was no longer disrupted, and fish became more abundant. They are now harvested from open boats. But replacement parts for outboard motors are also unobtainable due to the blockade. Boats from Choroní and Chuao, which we visited in the central part of the country, have managed to actually increase their catches nevertheless, since they have begun to use technology that enables them to locate schools of fish in the depths. Those along other parts of the coast do not have the devices yet. Again, trucks are also needed to get fish to consumers. And these trucks need refrigeration, which may need repairs. Many of our appliances are built so we can’t fix them. Venezuelans can’t fix them either, but they can’t buy a new one.
Seeds are another bottleneck. The imported seeds that Venezuelan farmers have relied upon are no longer available. We visited farms in Yaracuy, for example, that could not use all of their land for lack of seeds. Even people of the very urban Altos de Lidice commune in Caracas were very eager to get a share of the seeds that I brought along in my luggage. They have terraced a hillside too steep to have been built on, and they have been growing corn and other things. Now that they have seeds for things like beets and carrots they can let some plants go to seed and create a seed bank.
To learn more about the Venezuelan government’s views on food production we interviewed Diana Castillo, Office Director of the Ministry of Science and Technology, and Miguel Ángel Nuñez, an activist/scientist who has been a leader in the struggle to establish agro-ecological, organic, non-GMO practices in Venezuela.
They outlined a radical departure from agricultural policies of the past. Nuñez spoke of a science/peasant alliance, respecting the way peasants live on their land, the knowledge of plant and soil ecology that is implicit in their practice. The garden that a peasant family lives from, a conuco in Venezuela, a milpa in Mexico, is a sustainable form of production, a model for a new kind of agricultural production. The Ministry is focusing on seeds as a key component in a comprehensive program to use ecological methods to build soils, control pests, and improve production.
One notable achievement of this approach has been the development of potatoes adapted to local conditions. Centers to provide certified seed potatoes have been established in 24 locations in the Andean state of Merida, and 21 in other states across the country.
Science and Technology has to work with other ministries to deal with security, in every sense of the word. One of their concerns is contamination: genes from GMO plants getting into the seed banks, imports contaminated with plant or animal diseases, organisms that damage the soil. The heritage varieties and the biodiversity of Venezuela is an asset that needs to be protected. There are political threats, too. Guaidó’s people have already drawn up a law to bring in transgenic seeds. Land reform would be reversed and monoculture encouraged by the neocolonial government the US is attempting to re-establish.
Land reform began in earnest with Chávez’s election, but it has been a bitter, continuing struggle. We visited a farm in Yaracuy run by a collective of 15 to 20 families. Its ten hectares had been part of a larger parcel, which was not producing food, and thus was subject to redistribution according to the land reform law. It took years before their legal right to farm the land was recognized, while they suffered attacks of vandalism and an attempted assassination. They expect that the former landowner will try to drive them off if there is a change in government.
The farmers told us their tactics have always been non-violent; they have gained support by showing how much food they can generate. But they are determined to defend what they have created. They pointed out that after the coup in Bolivia the Venezuelan government distributed weapons to units of the volunteer militia. The farmers said their fellow campesinos consider the changes brought by land reform to be irreversible. They are prepared to take to the hills to defend what they have achieved.
Rural El Hatillo. Photo: Roxanna Fuentes
A recent census found that 51% of Venezuelans self-identify as Afro-descendants, many of whom are concentrated in certain areas, such as Veroes, a town centered around a sugar refinery in Yaracuy. The mayor of Veroes and others spoke to us, starting with all the reasons they have benefited from the Bolivarian process, summed up by referring to the enormous “social debt” that had been paid. As to the current situation: “We have been cimarrones for centuries,” alluding to Veroes’s history as a self-governing community of people who escaped from slavery and fiercely defended their freedom. The refinery was running under capacity due to lack of fertilizer and farm machinery parts needed to grow sugar cane. They were able to get seed, but certain acids needed in refining were lacking. They are moving forward by diversifying; we saw rice paddies in various stages of growth.
The refinery is “social property,” with an integral relationship to the town. When we arrived, we saw young people training in a field facing the office building. We were told that the area produces sugar, tobacco, coffee, and baseball players. Right now, there are seven players in the Major Leagues who started in the town’s program. Big league players would come back to coach the kids in off seasons. They can’t now, due to “sanctions.”
Many campesinos have turned to sophisticated organic methods to replace imported fertilizers. At another farm, we were told about power surges during the cyber-sabotage that caused massive blackouts last spring. The surges destroyed essential refrigeration and air conditioning equipment in the laboratory where these micro-organisms are cultured. Electronic devices throughout the country were affected, another less obvious consequence of the covert war against Venezuela’s ability to produce food.
The United States has frozen the assets of countless Venezuelan officials, declaring them to be engaged in corruption, drug trafficking, etc. Superficially, this tactic seems to affect only the individuals involved. But in reality, it is another way to attack the livelihood of everyone in the country. If the US designates an official as “corrupt,” then any transactions that they engage in automatically become suspect, even if the accusation is not true. A company doing business with that official’s enterprise or ministry risks prosecution or penalties for dealing with someone the US has designated a “criminal.” This intimidation is another way of economically isolating Venezuela for resisting imperial domination. It hurts the individuals named, and its effects are felt in countless everyday problems for the popular classes who depend on officials being able to do their jobs.
El Hatillo is one of the five municipalities that make up greater Caracas. Its small but charming Plaza Bolívar is surrounded by stores and restaurants catering to tourists and prosperous Venezuelans. The municipality also encompasses a rural area of steep hills and deep valleys, with small growers who can take advantage of the relative proximity of the city. We visited some families with members who are professors, students, or recent graduates of the University of Simón Bolívar, one of the most prestigious in the country. But inflation has reduced the value of their salaries, and they need another source of income.
Altos de Lídice Sewing workshop. Photo: Peter Lackowski
These were Chávistas, all engaged in agricultural production that they take to a farmers’ market — a wine maker fermenting berries, growers of cassaba who also make bread and flavored crackers from the nutritious root, and growers of herbs who offer advice on their medicinal uses. There is no commune in their area; their neighbors are too diverse politically and socially. They are professionals who are solidly on board with the Bolivarian revolution, producing for the people-to-people economy.
Chavistas often criticize President Nicolas Maduro for many things, depending on their point of view. Many think he should arrest Guaidó, in spite of Guaidó’s parliamentary immunity. Some see him as too conciliatory toward the bourgeoisie. Rural communes want more protection and support in their struggles with big landowners. But these people in El Hatillo are remarkably positive in their assessment of Maduro’s overall performance.
They praise him mainly for being able to keep the Bolivarian government in control of the country, thereby preventing the opposition from restoring Venezuela’s 20th century status as a neo-colony. They see programs such as CLAP and the housing mission (which has built over 3 million homes to date) as the continuation of Chávez’s concern for the welfare of the popular classes. They appreciate the introduction of the crypto-currency, the Petro, as an innovative response to the attack on the national currency, the Bolívar, Maduro’s acceptance of dollarization as simply being realistic.
I suspect that their spirited defense of Maduro is partly due to the virulent anti-Chavismo at the elite USB that they have had to deal with routinely. A recent graduate spoke of being harassed and put down by students and professors alike, grades reduced for political reasons, a raid on the office of the scholarship students’ association that featured feces and urine in their files.
We were in town when the National Assembly replaced Guaidó as its president. As usual, accounts of the event that we heard in Caracas were quite different from those in the US press. But the activities of right wing politicians never came up in conversations unless we asked. We found no indication that they have significant credibility among the popular classes, even those who have complaints about the government.
The economic war is certainly effective in making life more difficult for ordinary Venezuelans. But instead of dejection and despair, we observed a surge of grass roots organizing: communes, farmers’ markets, collective farms, city-country direct exchanges, community building in many forms. The activists we met this January share a cautious optimism, a sense that the Bolivarian process that Chávez initiated might survive this economic war. Meanwhile, a new kind of society, one based on communal values of cooperation, social solidarity, and mutual support, is emerging.
The report appeared first in Counterpunch on January 29, 2020. https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/29/venezuela-january-2020-hardship-and-resistance/
Peter Lackowski, a retired Vermont school teacher, has been visiting and writing about Latin America, including Bolivia, since 2004.
Paranoid Groundings and Technocratic States: Hillary Clinton versus Mark Zuckerberg
by Dr Binoy Kampmark
Her claim made in an interview with The Atlantic sounds like a lingering old home rant, somewhat demented, totally resentful. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook are in Trump’s pocket, she claims. This is far from a useful designation, because the only pocket Zuckerberg has ever been in is his own, and my does it go deep. She claims to have a ring side seat to reading his mind,
suggesting “that it’s to his and Facebook’s advantage not to cross Trump. That’s what I believe. And it just gives me a pit in my stomach.”
Review: “The Sacking Of Fallujah. A People’s History” – Ongoing Iraqi Genocide
by Dr Gideon Polya
“The Sacking Of Fallujah. A People’s History” by Ross Caputi (a US Iraq War veteran and scholar), Dr Richard Hil (a British Australian sociologist and academic), and Donna Mulhearn (an Australian human rights activist and journalist) tells the tragic story of the successive, and substantial demolitions of the huge Iraqi city of Fallujah by the US Alliance, first in 2004 during the war criminal US Coalition’s Iraq War (2003-2011) and then again in 2014-2016 during the US Coalition’s ongoing War on ISIS in Syria and Iraq (2012 onwards)
How U.S. and its Allies Enforce Their Lies for Wars and
Dictatorships
by Eric Zuesse
If America’s 607 billionaires had funded (via their corporations’ ads etc.) sites such as antiwar dot com as much as they fund sites such as nytimes dot com, then maybe the truth would become known as much as the lies that inundate Americans are, but the billionaires stand behind coups and rigged ‘elections’, not behind democracy anywhere; so, they don’t do any such thing.
How many Americans know that even in Hindu India, Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani (whom Trump has assassinated) was recognized as having been perhaps the world’s leader of the fight against both ISIS and the Taliban — two fundamentalist-Sunni (that is, pro-jihadist) groups that especially threaten India. Why don’t Americans know this crucial fact? In whose benefit is it that they don’t know it? It is in the interests of the few people who actually control the U.S. regime and its press, and these people will be identified here.
Without enforced suppression of truth, there would be no way that the U.S. and its allied regimes could continue hiding the lies that were behind their evil invasions of Iraq in 2003, and of Syria since 2012 (trying to deliver Syria to the Saud family), and their bloody coup against Ukraine in 2014, and also their take-overs and attempted take-overs of other countries (such as Bolivia and Venezuela) that had refused to be bullied by the U.S. regime into complying with its obsessive anti-Russian demands. All of these operations are part of the U.S. regime’s secret continuation of the Cold War, even after Russia had quit the Cold War in 1991. (The Cold War itself had started inside U.S. President Harry S. Truman’s head, as an immediate result of a deceptive statement that had been made to him by his top general, Dwight David Eisenhower, on 26 July 1945.)
And, so, all of these lies are still being pumped by the U.S. regime (which itself effectively took over the U.S. Government on that date, 26 July 1945), and remain fully enforced by suppression of the truth about each one of these (and many other) matters. It’s being done in all news-media except a few of the non-mainstream ones. This is a widespread white-out of history, and replacing that history by myths, in order to deceive their own masses into misinterpreting (so that the domestic public will support) U.S. foreign policies, which are in the regimes’ interests but not in the interests of the American people (nor of any other).
For example, as soon as Bolivia’s President Evo Morales, on 10 November 2019, offered Bolivia’s U.S.-trained generals to hold another election there and to again have the Bolivian people assert their will, the U.S.-trained generals refused his offer and ordered him to immediately resign; and, the very next day, Donald Trump said “The United States applauds the Bolivian people for demanding freedom and the Bolivian military for abiding by its oath to protect not just a single person, but Bolivia’s constitution.” The #29 Alexa-ranked in U.S. New York Times editorialized on November 11th that “when a leader resorts to brazenly abusing the power and institutions put in his care by the electorate, as President Evo Morales did in Bolivia, it is he who sheds his legitimacy, and forcing him out often becomes the only remaining option. That is what the Bolivians have done.” Then, the #81,090 Alexa-ranked in U.S. Antiwar.com headlined “Finally Got Him: The Bolivian Coup”, and their Ted Snider reported the truth that’s excluded from America’s mainstream ‘news’-media about this, including:
If it wasn’t a coup, why was Morales forced from office by the military? Why was he driven out of office in Bolivia and into asylum in Mexico for the sake of his safety, while a coup leader announced that the police and military were hunting Morales down and putting Bolivia into lockdown? Why, as he fled and sought asylum, was his house ransacked, his sister’s house set on fire, and the families of his cabinet ministers kidnapped and held hostage until the ministers resigned? Though reported in the mainstream media as abandoning Morales, Victor Borda resigned as president of the Bolivian congress and resigned his position as MP because his brother was kidnapped to force him to do so.
If it wasn’t a coup, why did the opposition assume power before the legislature voted on approving Morales’ resignation as the constitution demands? Why did Jeanine Añez declare herself interim president in the absence of the quorum that is legally required to make that decision after meeting with the military high command for over an hour? …
The often repeated claim that Morales went against the constitution is also a manipulation of the truth. The claim is based on a 2016 Bolivian referendum that decided in favor of term limits. That referendum, which passed by a count of 51%-49%, would have prevented Morales from running in the current election. But what the charge omits is that a year later, Bolivia’s highest court – whose decisions stand as the law of the land – ruled against the term limits that the referendum had so narrowly favored. So, Morales did not attempt, as Trump claimed, “to override the Bolivian constitution.”
And the third strike against Trump’s claim is that Morales did not override the will of the people. The people overwhelmingly re-elected him. Morales won 47.1% of the vote, while the next closest candidate, Carlos Mesa, managed to attract only 36.5% of the voters. The Bolivian constitution allows a president to be elected in the first round without a runoff if he or she wins at least 40% of the vote and defeats the person who came in second place by at least 10%. So, Morales clearly got reelected to the presidency in the first round. …
The second reason [why the coup was done] was economically motivated. If Venezuela has oil, Bolivia has lithium: lots of lithium. In fact, Bolivia may have 70% of the world’s lithium reserves. And lithium is the new oil. As oil is essential for gas powered cars, so lithium is essential for electric cars. Morales, like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, is a nationalist who sought a new relationship between his land’s people and his land’s resources: he didn’t want all the wealth from Bolivia’s natural resources slipping through the fingers of the Bolivian people and into the hands of the huge international corporations. And as that approach to oil put Chavez in the sights of the American coup planners, so Morales’ approach to lithium put him in their sights.
Morales was willing to allow foreign companies into Bolivia, but he stipulated that any lithium mining had to be carried out in equal partnership with Bolivia’s national mining company and Bolivia’s national lithium company. That made Morales a problem to the big transnational mining companies. A problem that had to go.
In 2018, Germany’s ACI Systems had come to an agreement with Bolivia. Listening to the protest of the people of the region, Morales canceled that deal on November 4, 2019. A few days later, Morales was gone.
The third reason was politically motivated. After Chavez pushed the Latin American political pendulum to the left, a series of coups, elections and American meddling have pushed that pendulum back to the right. But the pendulum has a domestic mind of its own, and it has begun swinging back to the left, including in large, important countries like Mexico and Argentina. The Bolivian election may have offered America an opportunity to put its hand back on the pendulum.
The leaked coup conversations clearly identify American senators Marco Rubio, Bob Menéndez and Ted Cruz as being committed to aiding the coup. Marco Rubio’s tweets, before the vote count was even finished, set the stage early for the coup.
And that may not be the only supporting role America played. It was the Bolivian military that provided the push that triggered the coup. The chief commander of the Bolivian armed forces, Williams Kaliman, put the final and decisive pressure on Morales to resign. On November 10, Kaliman announced that the military “suggest[s] the President of the State renounce his presidential mandate.”
But Kaliman has deep ties to the US military. Though not mentioned in the mainstream media, it was reported early on in the Latin American media that Kaliman had served for several years as Bolivia’s military attaché to Washington. …
If America’s 607 billionaires had funded (via their corporations’ ads etc.) sites such as antiwar dot com as much as they fund sites such as nytimes dot com, then maybe the truth would become known as much as the lies that inundate Americans are, but the billionaires stand behind coups and rigged ‘elections’, not behind democracy anywhere; so, they don’t do any such thing.
Consequently, this is actually about a Western version of samizdat — it’s the West’s equivalent to the former Soviet Union’s systematic, and equally pervasive, truth-suppression, to fool the public into thinking that the Government represents them, no matter how much it does not. (The chief trick in this regard is to fool them into thinking that since there is more than one political party, one of them will be “good,” even though the fact may actually be that each of the parties represents simply a different faction of a psychopathically cravenous aristocracy — in this case, America’s billionaires, who control the country’s international corporations. After all: each American party lied and supported invading Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, and Syria constantly; and no American party acknowledges that the 2014 regime-change in Ukraine was a U.S. coup instead of having been a domestic Ukrainian democratic revolution, such as they all allege. Part of the Obama Administration’s plan for its takeover of Ukraine was to steal Russia’s Crimean naval base and to transform it into a U.S. naval base. But that portion of Obama’s coup-plan wasn’t able to be successfully executed (because Putin blocked his takeover of Crimea). On such important matters, all of those media lie, and in basically the same ways. These lies are bipartisan, even though most of the regime’s other political lies are heavily partisan — telling different things to Democrats than to Republicans. Merely having multiple political parties doesn’t necessarily mean that the country isn’t a dictatorship. The multi-party trick is crucial to America’s fascism; and, in fact, America’s Founders, who wrote the Constitution, were hoping to establish a one-party democratic government; but no mainstream U.S. medium draws attention to that uncomfortable-for-today’s-billionaires historical fact. Unprofitable truths get hidden, instead of reported.)
Right now, Julian Assange is rotting to death inside Britain’s equivalent to the U.S. regime’s Guanatanamo Bay prison, which is Belmarsh Prison, in London. As the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia’s article on Belmarsh Prison retrospectively admits, “Between 2001 and 2002, Belmarsh Prison was used to detain a number of people indefinitely without charge or trial under the provisions of the Part 4 of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, leading it to be called the ‘British version of Guantanamo Bay’.” However, only because of the case of Julian Assange is it now publicly known that this characterization of that prison is — at least for him — equally true today; he is being tortured there. And Assange is, indeed, being held in that hell-hole “indefinitely without charge or trial,” even after his having previously been held in various other forms of confinement, ever since at least 12 April 2012, when — being then ‘temporarily’ under house-arrest in Norfolk England, while awaiting trial on a manufactured rape-charge against him which was reluctantly abandoned by the Government only when the alleged victim refused to testify against him — Assange broadcast an interview for RT, Russian Television, an interview of the head of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. The U.S.-and-allied regimes’ billionaires-owned-and-controlled ‘news’-media condemned Assange for this interview, because it enabled whomever still had an open mind, amongst the Western public, to hear from one of those billionares’ destruction-targets (Nasrallah), and they criticized Assange for doing this on the international TV-news network of the main country that America’s billionaires are especially trying to conquer, which is (and since 26 July 1945 has consistently been) Russia. (Of course, regime-fronts such as PBS, CNN and BBC, wouldn’t have telecast any interview of Nasrallah, but U.S.-and-allied billionaires want no news-operation to do so.) The great then-independent investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald headlined about that interview, at Salon on 18 April 2012, “Attacks on RT and Assange reveal much about the critics: Those who pretend to engage in adversarial journalism will invariably hate those who actually do it.” How true that was, and unfortunately still is, in this dictatorship! And Assange himself is the best example of the regime’s hypocrisies. Greenwald wrote:
Let’s examine the unstated premises at work here. There is apparently a rule that says it’s perfectly OK for a journalist to work for a media outlet owned and controlled by a weapons manufacturer (GE/NBC/MSNBC), or by the U.S. and British governments (BBC/Stars & Stripes/Voice of America), or by Rupert Murdoch and Saudi Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal (Wall St. Journal/Fox News), or by a banking corporation with long-standing ties to right-wing governments (Politico), or by for-profit corporations whose profits depend upon staying in the good graces of the U.S. government (Kaplan/The Washington Post), or by loyalists to one of the two major political parties (National Review/TPM/countless others), but it’s an intrinsic violation of journalistic integrity to work for a media outlet owned by the Russian government. Where did that rule come from?
Then, after ‘temporary’ house-arrest there, Assange was allowed asylum by Ecuador’s progressive President Rafael Correa on 20 June 2012, to stay in London’s Ecuadoran Embassy, so as not to be seized by the UK regime to be sent to prison and probable death-without-trial in the U.S. To Correa’s shock, it turned out that Correa’s successor, Vice President Lenin Moreno, behaved actually as a U.S. agent, promptly forcing Assange out of the Embassy, into Belmarsh prison, to die there or else become extradited to die in a U.S. prison, also without trial.
So: for what is Assange being imprisoned, and perhaps murdered? He divulged government secrets that should never even have been secrets! His ‘crime’ was to reveal truths. He raised the blanket of lies, which covers over these actually dictatorial clandestine international actions. He exposed these evil imperialistic operations, which are hidden behind (and under) the blanket of imperialists’ lies. For this, he is being martyred — he martyrs for democracy, in countries where there is no actual democracy (but only those lies).
Here is an example of the lies for which his Wikileaks places itself on the block even now:
On December 29th, I headlined “Further Proof: U.S., UK, & France Committed War-Crime on 14 April 2018” and reported highlights of the latest Wikileaks document-dumps regarding a U.S.-UK-French operation to cover-up (via their control over the OPCW) these three regimes having committed an international war-crime when they had fired 105 missiles against Syria on 14 April 2018, which was done allegedly to punish Syria for having perpetrated a gas-attack in Douma seven days before — except that there hadn’t been any such gas-attack, but the OPCW simply lied and said that there might have been one, and that the Syrian Government might have done it, even though the management had been informed by their own technical staff that all of this was false! That’s playing the public for suckers, and it’s what the OPCW now does.
Back on 3 November 2019, Fox News bannered “Fox News Poll: Bipartisan majorities want some U.S. troops to stay in Syria” and reported that when citing ISIS as America’s enemy that must be defeated, 69% of U.S. respondents wanted U.S. troops to stay in Syria. But when did ISIS ever constitute a threat to U.S. national security? And under what international law is any U.S. soldier, who is inside Syria, anything other than an invader there? The answer, to both of these questions, is obviously “never” and “none.” Syria has repeatedly ordered all uninvited foreigners out and declared them to be alien invaders. (Russian troops, by contrast, were invited in and actually started the operation against ISIS in Syria, which embarrassed the U.S. then to join in on that, even while the U.S. assisted ISIS forces in Iraq to escape into Syria (so as to help overthrow its secular Government) — supreme hypocrisy.) But if you are an investor in Lockheed Martin, don’t you want the American people to be suckers about both? And, so, they are. People such as Julian Assange don’t want the public anywhere to be lied-to. Anyone who is in the propaganda-business — serving companies such as Lockheed Martin — wants the public to be suckers. (How else will U.S. taxpayers willingly support their constantly funding the world’s most corrupt military?)
Whereas Russian media openly state that Qasem Soleimani was the world’s most effective general against ISIS, no U.S. media do, but some of them provide buried in a report facts which support the conclusion, such as here and here and here, and some news-media of other nations (even of India) also are more public about the fact. (Even in anti-Muslim India, General Suleimani is recognized as having been a global leader in the battles against both ISIS and the Taliban — both of which fundamentalist-Sunni groups threaten India.) So, on January 3rd, Trump assassinated the world’s most effective general who led the elimination of ISIS. And the U.S. Government calls Soleimani a ‘terrorist’, because America’s billionaires want to grab Iran back.
Sometimes, however, political partisanship in America does make public, to the supporters of one Party, the lies that are being told by a representative of another Party, such as happened, for example, on January 4th when the Democratic Party propaganda-organ Huffington Post headlined “Mike Pence Slammed After Falsely Linking Qassem Soleimani To 9/11: Neither Iran nor Soleimani were linked to the terror attack in the 9/11 Commission report. Pence didn’t even get the number of hijackers right.” However, even when that happens, the public aren’t being informed that the problem is all of America’s billionaires — of both Parties — and not merely the billionaires who finance the careers of the public officials in ‘the opposite’ Party.
This is the way the free market actually works. It works by lying, and in such a country the Government serves the people who have the money, and not the people who don’t. The people who don’t have the money are instead supposed to be lied-to (such as to buy whatever the billionaires’ firms sell). And, so, they are. But this is not democracy. Democracy, in fact, is impossible if the public are predominantly deceived. If the public are predominantly deceived, then the people who do the deceiving will be the dictators there. And, if a country has dictators, then it’s no democracy. In a totally free market, only the people with the most money will have any freedom at all; most of the public will be merely their suckers, who are fooled by the professionals at doing that — lying. Who, ultimately, will be paying by far the vast majority of those professionals? Of course, the owners of the U.S.-based international corporations will be.
The super-rich enforce their smears, and their other lies, by hiring professionals to do this.
When Barack Obama said that “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation” — so that each other nation is “dispensable” — he was merely exemplifying the view that only the most powerful is indispensable, and that therefore everyone else is dispensable. Of course, this is the way that he, and Donald Trump, both have governed in the U.S. And Americans overwhelmingly endorse this viewpoint. They’re fooled by both parties, because both parties serve only their respective billionaires — and because billionaires are above the law; they are the law, in America and its allied regimes. That’s the way it is.
This is the American gospel, and it’s called “capitalism.” That’s any kind of capitalism, not only democratic, but even facsist — i.e., dictatorial capitalism. Oddly, after Russia switched to capitalism in 1991, the American gospel switched instead to pure global conquest — über-imperialism (now called in America “neoconservatism,” but it’s just ordinary fascist imperialism, indistinguishable from the Axis powers of WW II) — and the American public didn’t even blink. So: nowadays, capitalism has come to mean über-imperialism. That’s today’s American gospel. It’s a certain type of capitalism — a very ugly type. This is fascism. Adolf Hitler would be smiling, upon today’s Amerika.
And, as far as whistleblowers — such as Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning, and other champions of honesty and of democracy — are concerned: Americans agree with the billionaires, who detest and destroy such whistleblowers. Champions of democracy are shunned here, where PR reigns, and real journalism is almost non-existent (except at a few of the small independent online news sites including this, but most even most of the small online sites parrot one or the other of the U.S. political Party’s viewpoints, against all the other Parties, in order to pretend to be ‘anti-Establishment’ — which isn’t the same thing as being truly independent).
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
Originally posted at strategic-culture.org
Hovering in Cyberspace
by Edward Curtin
We live in a fabricated reality where the visible world became nearly meaningless once the screen world became people’s “window on the world.” An electronic nothingness replaced reality as people gleefully embraced digital wraparound apparitions. These days people still move about in the physical world but live in the electronic one. The result is mass
hallucination.
Serving Others And Sometimes Facing Repercussions
by Sally Dugman
A personal account
Bangladesh: Recalling 1969 Mass Uprising
by R Chowdhury
One hundred and twenty-five thousand miles below that historic moon walk, the Bengalis of East Pakistan started a renewed but aggressive, at times violent, march for their rights. It was a show of their outrage against the central rulers never seen before.
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