Category Archives: culture

Saturday Matinee: Salvador

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From Wikipedia:

Salvador is a 1986 American war drama film co-written and directed by Oliver Stone. It stars James Woods as Richard Boyle, alongside Jim Belushi, Michael Murphy and Elpidia Carrillo, with John Savage and Cynthia Gibb in supporting roles. Stone co-wrote the screenplay with Boyle.

The film tells the story of American journalist covering the Salvadoran Civil War who becomes entangled with both the FMLN and the right wing military while trying to rescue his girlfriend and her children. The film is highly sympathetic towards the left-wing revolutionaries and strongly critical of the U.S.-supported military, focusing on the murder of four American churchwomen, including Jean Donovan, and the assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero by death squads. The film was nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Actor in a Leading Role (Woods) and Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen (Stone and Boyle).

 

Bust the Trust: Now is the Time to Break Up Amazon

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By Andy Laties with additional reporting by Sander Hicks

Source: The New York Megaphone

Standing at the cash register at an Upper West Side independent bookstore I used to run, I once noted the frequent passage of cars painted all over with Amazon’s “And You’re Done” logo. These same-day delivery vehicles were Amazon’s way of pushing back against the resurgence of New York City independent bookselling in progress. Soon, the cars were joined by a Columbus Circle location of the Amazon Books chain. That brick-and-mortar store gave lie to Amazon’s long-standing rhetoric that physical bookstores were doomed.

I have competed with Amazon for twenty years. A couple years ago, we indies were finally winning. 2015 was a great year. More independent stores were opening than closing: Books Are Magic, Greenlight, Word Up, Stories, Archestratus Books & Foods, Astoria Bookshop and Quimby’s. New locations for Book Culture, McNally Jackson, WORD and Books of Wonder were in the works. That trend was mirrored nationally. While our numbers had fallen from 4,000 to 1,500, between 1995 and 2005, now we were pushing 2,000 bookstores again.

Why do indy bookstores matter so much? Well, here’s one way to put it, from the writer Ocean Vuong, “The way I see it, whenever someone walks into a bookstore, they are walking into the future of their cultural and intellectual life. A bookseller collaborates with who you are in order to show you a way forward towards more of yourself, a way you might not have known existed for you–but is still entirely your own. Amazon, with its algorithms, can only show you where you’ve been, can only give you the calcified mirror of your past. In a bookstore, you get a human being who is also a mapmaker of possibility.”

 

A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF AMAZON

Amazon itself had started as a New York City project. But retailers don’t collect sales tax on out-of-state shipments. So when hedge fund boy wonder Jeff Bezos rounded up his one million in in start-up capital, he left New York City behind. He launched his company in the lightly-populated Washington State. Bezos planned a national mail-order operation that wouldn’t have to collect sales tax in any other state, especially populous New York and California. Thus, most customers would enjoy a six percent or more cost reduction on each sale.

We indie businesses fought together for twenty years to force Amazon to collect sales tax. And we won. I’m proud of what we fierce indies did to force Amazon to pay sales tax. These taxes fund public services like Medicaid and the local fire department. But Amazon had evolved during the battle, and like that strangling kudzu vine you thought you killed last Fall, it grew back even bigger in the Spring. Instead of dying, Amazon turned into that monster plant from Little Shop of Horrors.

After our victories at the state and national levels, there was no longer any reason for Bezos to base his company in Seattle. That’s one reason Amazon is expanding with a big new HQ2 planned for Crystal City, VA. They recently planned to come back to New York City, but chickened out due to the public criticisms about Amazon’s lucrative tax breaks.

Ten years ago, Amazon used to be an innovative book-seller online. Today, They work for CIA, NSA, they help do facial recognition for ICE. They are bidding to create a “new brain” for the Pentagon, in the little-known “JEDI” program. With Jeff Bezos’s ownership of the Washington Post, they are simultaneously powerful DC lobbyists, defense contractors, spies, and a leading DC media vehicle. Amazon is one juggernaut of unbridled corporate and war-making power.

Amazon developed its Amazon Web Services (AWS), the highly profitable, cloud-hosting division, out of the software and hardware infrastructure that runs its online retail operation. Recent headlines tell the tale of how Amazon monetized AWS. Technology Review reported, “Amazon is the Invisible Backbone Behind ICE’s Immigration Crackdown” And Business Insider let us know that “Amazon is Launching a ‘Secret’ Cloud Service for the CIA.” “‘Alexa, Drop a Bomb’: Amazon Wants in on US Warfare” reveals the plans between Amazon and the Pengaton, for the new JEDI program, as reported by Truthout.

The new Amazon wants to become a leading merchant of death, specializing in robotic drones, while moonlighting as web host for ICE and CIA. Its planned “Washington D.C. footprint” is just across the highway from the Pentagon. The failed effort to come into Queens was offering “twenty-five-thousand jobs.” But who can count how many jobs Amazon has killed, and how many retail stores have closed, due to Amazon artificially lowering prices? (A recent article in Yale Law School journal makes the case that Amazon might be on the road to being a monopoly, since it artificially lowers prices to kill competition.) Amazon promises to add jobs in NYC, but recently committed to making those jobs non-union. Workers at Amazon warehouses complain of onerous conditions at low wages, in which bathroom breaks are rare, and workers sometimes have to urinate into plastic bottles.

Amazon is super convenient. It’s true. But Amazon’s retail customers will feel angst and regret once they learn their dollars pay for robotic drone warfare and racial profiling of immigrants.

Recently, the American Booksellers Association reported that Amazon could be a monopoly. They control 75% of all online retail bookselling, the way that Standard Oil controlled the oil industry, before it was broken up as a monopoly, in 1911.

Let’s resist this new version of the Amazon monopoly. Amazon is an arms dealer and corporate spy. Let’s advocate that the Federal Trade Commission dismember the Amazon octopus. Let’s support a movement that is fired up to do “trust-busting.”

For our safety, it’s time to break up Amazon.

 

Andrew Laties is the author of Rebel Bookseller: Why Indie Businesses Stand for Everything You Want to Fight For, from Free Speech to Buying Local to Building Communities. He currently co-owns Book and Puppet Company, in Easton, Pennsylvania.

Everyone Has Fallen for the Lies About Venezuela

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By Lee Camp

Source: truthdig

There are three things I know for sure in this fanciful, sometimes inglorious experience we call life:

  1. You will never have a safety pin when you need one, and you will have thousands when you don’t need one.
  2. Wild animals are breathtakingly majestic until they’re crawling up your pant leg.
  3. A U.S. presidential administration will never admit that it invaded another country or backed a coup attempt in order to essentially steal the natural resources (oil) of said country.

This is why it was so very shocking last week when members of the Trump administration admitted they were backing a coup attempt in order to essentially steal the natural resources (oil) of another country.

That country is Venezuela. I’ll get back to this in a moment.

Let’s take a second to go over the big three. There are three things that seem to provoke the ornery United States into overthrowing or bringing down a foreign government, no matter how many innocent civilians may die in the process. (If enough die, the perpetrators often get nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.) If your country has one of these things, the U.S. might screw with you. If your country has two of these things, the U.S. will definitely screw with you. If your country has three of these things, then look behind you, because the U.S. is currently screwing you:

1. Being socialist.

Pretty self-explanatory. If you don’t have the same economic system as we do, we treat it like you have candy and we’re not allowed to have any, so we slip razor blades in yours and tell everyone your candy kills people.

2. Dropping the U.S. dollar.

Iraq dropped the dollar. We invaded.
Syria dropped the dollar. We invaded.
Iran dropped the dollar. We want to invade.
Libya dropped the dollar. We invaded.

Pakistan dropped the dollar in trade with China, and the following day the U.S. added them to the list of countries violating religious freedom. (I guess you could argue they did indeed violate our religion: The dollar.)

Basically, we do NOT take kindly to countries dropping the dollar.

In unrelated news, Venezuela dropped the dollar.

3. Having oil or other natural resources the U.S. needs.

In case you were curious, Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the known world. (But we haven’t checked northern Wyoming yet, because it’s a long, cold drive with nary a 7-11.)

So these are the three ACTUAL reasons the U.S. has created an attempted coup in Venezuela over the past several weeks. And right now, you are falling into one of two categories. Either you’re saying to yourself, “Of course those are the reasons. Those are the only reasons the U.S. ever tries to bring down governments.” OR you still have some strange, deep-rooted faith in our Pepsi-and-pharmaceutical-owned media outlets, and therefore you’re thinking, “That’s not true. The U.S. supports the opposition in Venezuela because we want to help those poor starving people.” But if that were accurate, we would be tripping over ourselves to help starving and sick people around the world. Instead we (oddly) only seek to help them when they have oil under their feet. And in fact, data has proven this true. A study a few years ago from the Universities of Portsmouth, Warwick and Essex found that foreign intervention in civil conflicts is 100 times more likely if the country has a great deal of oil, versus none.

So who is feeding the average American the idea that our involvement in Venezuela is about helping people? Only EVERY mainstream media channel in America—from MSNBC to Fox News to NPR to Bill fuckin’ Maher. It’s truly mind-numbing to watch so-called “liberals” march in lockstep with the likes of John Bolton, Elliott Abrams, Donald Trump and every neocon not currently in a coma.

These outlets froth at the mouth while presenting segments explaining that the Venezuelan people are starving, but they also purposefully avoid mentioning that a lot of Venezuela’s hardships are due to U.S. sanctions. This isn’t to say Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, has done an awesome job. But whether he has or not, saying we must sanction them to help them is like if somebody fell through a plate glass window and you said, “Let’s help him! Let’s start cutting the glass shards out of his skin with this rusty flathead screwdriver I found in an abandoned mine! Then we’ll pour Mountain Dew and sewage water in the wounds to help them heal!”

But that’s what our sanctions are designed to do. They’re devised from day one to hurt poor and average people the most, in order to make them angry enough to rebel. Over a year ago, when Rex Tillerson was secretary of state, he publicly said we could tell our sanctions on North Korea were working great because poor fishermen were washing up on the beaches starved to death. (One is perplexed by how difficult it is at times to tell the difference between “helping other countries” and mass murder.)

Sanctions are not smart bombs. They destroy everybody, except the rich—who have enough money to weather the sanctions. Come to think of it, sanctions are kind of like smart bombs. We’re told they’re only going to hit the bad guys, but in fact “smart bombs” kill all kinds of innocent civilians, just like sanctions do.

Furthermore, the U.S. “humanitarian aid” that we claim to be sending is not what it seems. Even NPR took a break from its traditional role as State Department stenographer-in-training to reveal that the “humanitarian aid” is actually meant to create regime change. And McClatchy last week uncovered that the North Carolina-based private freight company 21 Air LLC has made 40 secretive flights to Venezuela from the U.S. in the past month, and the Venezuelan government claimed the flights were filled to the brim with assault weapons and ammunition destined for opposition forces. (Apparently we thought the Venezuelans were going to cook up a fresh pot of bullet stew to ease their hunger pains.) To make matters worse, two executives at the company have ties to an air cargo company that helped the CIA “rendition” supposed terrorists to black sites for “interrogation” (read: torture).

The next piece of propaganda lovingly pedestalled by our mainstream media robot-heads is simply calling Juan Guaidó the “interim president” without mentioning that he was not elected to that position and only 30 out of 200 nations recognize him as such. He just declared himself president. Last I checked, that’s not really how governments work. But if it is—OK, I hereby declare myself governor of … let’s say, Idaho. No one will really notice. I’m pretty sure the current governor is a hedgehog in a bow tie.

There are many other things CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and all the rest don’t want you to know about Juan Guaidó. For example, until he named himselfpresident, 81 percent of Venezuelans didn’t even know who he was, according to a poll conducted by the Venezuela-based firm Hinterlaces. And he only won his own assembly seat with 26% of the vote. In order to win elections in any country, you often need more than 30 percent of the people to have heard of you. Pauly Shore has more name recognition among Venezuelans than Juan Guaidó.

On top of that, Guaidó went to George Washington University. As the Grayzone Project reported, “[In 2007] He moved to Washington, D.C., to enroll in the Governance and Political Management Program at George Washington under the tutelage of Venezuelan economist Luis Enrique Berrizbeitia, one of the top Latin American neoliberal economists. Berrizbeitia is a former executive director of the International Monetary Fund. …”

Guaidó went to GW, trained under Mr. IMF, and then we declared him president of Venezuela. That’s like studying at the WWE, training under Henry Kissinger, and then the U.S. declares you the King of Japan.

But it doesn’t stop there, according to the Grayzone Project:

“Juan Guaidó is the product of a decade-long project overseen by Washington’s elite regime change trainers. While posing as a champion of democracy, he has spent years at the forefront of a violent campaign of destabilization.”

Furthermore, Juan Guaidó has already said he wants to sell Venezuela’s oil to foreign companies and let the IMF back in, which will drown the country in debt.

So he’s an American regime-change pawn who was groomed by the IMF to take over Venezuela and give away their natural resources. What a catch. … But if this is what the Venezuelan people really want, then we should respect their wishes. The corporate media tells us this is what the people want, right?

Except that it’s not.

“According to a study conducted in early January 2019 … 86 percent of Venezuelans would disagree with international military intervention,” Grayzone’s Ben Norton reported last month. “And 81 percent oppose the US sanctions that have gravely hurt the nation’s economy.”

So, based on the Hinterlaces poll, most Venezuelans didn’t know Guaidó until recently. Most Venezuelans still support Maduro even if they believe corruption in the government has increased (whether you personally like Maduro or not doesn’t matter), and most Venezuelans don’t want military intervention or U.S. sanctions. Yet CNN and NPR and Fox News and the BBC and every other corporate outlet will have you thinking everyone is starving to death, on their knees begging for America’s democracy bombs to rain down like dollar bills at a strip club.

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe those people really need our help, and U.S. intervention will work out great—exactly like it did in Syria,
and Yemen,
and Iraq,
and Iran,
and Afghanistan,
and Chile,
and Honduras,
and Haiti,
and Somalia,
and Libya,
and Guatemala,
and Nicaragua,
and Colombia,
and Panama,
and Fraggle Rock,
and those tree forts where the EWOKS LIVED!

Now that we have a general understanding of the situation (and why Anderson Cooper is not keen to remind viewers what happened with Fraggle Rock in the early ’90s), let’s get back to the question of oil.

When I first started writing this, I didn’t have proof the American government wanted Venezuela’s oil; it was just a hunch. Kinda like if you put a balloon in a room with a porcupine, you have a hunch he’ll pop the balloon. But I didn’t have a quote from a top Trump administration official saying, “We’d like to take their oil.”

Then national security adviser and Mustache of Doom John Bolton said, “hold my beer.” While on Fox News he stated clearly, “It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.”

That’s Beltway Speak for “We want their oil.”

For 20 years we’ve been trying to destroy Venezuela, and our government always gives the standard line: “We want to help the people. We care about their democracy. They have a lot of inflation, and that’s why we need to drop our freedom bombs on their heads.” They’ve trotted out that bullshit brigade under Bush, Obama and now Trump. The officials never just say, “Yeah, there’s like, tons of oil there, and we want it.”

Yet, here it is. The disguise of neoliberal world domination has come off. (Ironically, the fake mustache was yanked off to reveal a much larger mustache.)

Also, it’s amazing how monotone and matter-of-fact Bolton is as he speaks. A U.S.-backed coup often ends in terrible violence with tens of thousands of innocent people killed. It’s truly heartbreaking, no matter which side you support. Sometimes it ends up with a brutal military junta taking control. Yet, here is John Bolton discussing it the same way he would analyze whether to have chocolate fudge ice cream or apple pie for dessert. (“Hmmm, possible death of a hundred thousand people? That sounds good—I’ll have that.”)

This is all the more horrifying because these policies are decided by unelected maniacs like Elliot Abrams, Mike Pompeo and John Bolton. Trump just named Abrams special envoy to Venezuela despite the fact the guy has a resume that would make Josef Mengele blush. And what’s even more jaw-dropping is watching the liberati like Rachel Maddow, Bill Maher and nearly every democrat in Congress get in line to support the talking points of right-wing warlords (the belligerati) like Bolton, Abrams, Pompeo, Trump, Hannity and nearly every Republican in Congress. The mountains of propaganda put forward make it hard to breathe (the air is thinner up here).

Worse yet—even the Wall Street Journal stated the U.S. push to oust Maduro is just the first shot in the oligarchy’s plan to reshape Latin America. It turns out sociopathy is addictive. Our American empire knows no bounds to its nation-building (after nation-destroying).

The Venezuelan people deserve self-determination, no matter how you feel about the current government. The absolute last thing they need is to be turned into a neocon / neoliberal parking lot in which America rips all their resources out from under them while calling it “freedom.” Luckily, there are already many signs this U.S.-created attempted coup is failing.

—

If you think this column is important, please share it. Also you can join Lee Camp’s free email newsletter here.

This column is based on a monologue Lee Camp wrote and performed on his TV show, “Redacted Tonight.”

‘Highly Disturbing’: Facebook Blocks Viral Video Outlets Critical of US Foreign Policy and Corporate Media

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Journalists and free speech advocates are calling out the social media giant for shuttering the pages after CNN inquired about Berlin-based media company Maffick’s funding from the Russian government

By Jessica Corbett

Source: Common Dreams

Journalists and advocates of press freedoms are once more directing outrage and criticism at Facebook for selectively censoring pages on its platform and refusing to explain the reason behind a decision that appears to many as a clear double standard applied to outlets critical of U.S. foreign policy and corporate interests.

Facebook is under fire for shuttering four pages managed by the Berlin-based news and media company Maffick, after CNN reporters asked the social media giant about Maffick not disclosing that it is partly funded by the Russian government.

CNN held its report—titled “Russia is backing a viral video company aimed at American millennials“—until Friday, when Facebook blocked Soapbox, Waste-Ed, Backthen, and In The Now.

American-Lebanese journalist Rania Khalek, a contributor to Soapbox and In The Now who was interviewed by CNN, outlined the controversy in a lengthy, widely shared series of tweets. Monday morning, Khalek added an update to the Twitter thread:

As CNN outlined in its report, which was updated and corrected on Monday:

Company records [for Maffick] in Germany show that 51 percent of the company is owned by Ruptly [a subsidiary of RT, which is funded by the Russian government]. The remaining 49 percent is controlled by former RT presenter Anissa Naouai, who is Maffick’s CEO. The records were first reported by the German outlet T-online and later by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which brought it to CNN‘s attention. The Alliance for Securing Democracy is part of the German Marshall Fund, which receives funding from the U.S., German, and other governments. The Alliance for Securing Democracy says that while it is part of the German Marshall Fund, the ASD itself does not receive any funding from the GMF, and gets its money from private family funds and grants but not from government funding.

“In the Now was originally a television show on RT, hosted by Naouai. It has more than 3 million followers on Facebook,” CNN noted. The other three pages “have more than 30 million video views, though they’ve only been operating for a few months.”

What kind of content did they produce? Khalek offered a number of examples, including:

In an interview with CNN, Maffick chief operating officer J. Ray Sparks emphasized that Maffick is editorially independent from RT—which the U.S. government has forced to register as a foreign agent—and pointed out that it is “standard industry practice” not to disclose ownership of a media producer on a Facebook page.

However, as Kevin Gosztola—who cohosts a podcast with Khalek—noted in an article published Saturday on Shadowproof, “Although Khalek and Sparks detailed their editorial independence at Maffick extensively, [CNN correspondent Drew] Griffin remained incredulous at the reality that officials working at the Kremlin are not dictating what specific stories should be covered.”

“Similarly to NPR, PBS, BBC, DW, CBC, AJ+, and many other media companies, Maffick is supported in part by government funding. Likewise while we haven’t posted funding details on our Facebook pages etc, neither have any of our international peers,” Maffick said in a statement that charges the company was singled out for “one reason and one reason only: The government that helps fund our company is Russia.”

“We did not violate any of Facebook’s policies whatsoever. None of our content promotes disinformation or fake news. Yet CNN pressured Facebook into unprecedented censorship in a desperate attempt to milk ratings by stoking hysteria over Russia,” the statement continues, calling on Facebook to reinstate its pages and “articulate clear, consistent policies and protocols regarding obligatory funding disclosures which will be applied evenly across all pages.”

Since Friday, Khalek and others who often linked to her initial thread have turned to another major social media platform—Twitter—to raise alarm about the role of the ASD and the communication CNN subsequently had with Facebook:

Although Facebook’s rules don’t require pages to disclose parent companies, a spokesperson told CNN in a statement that the social media company planned to reach out to Maffick page administrators “to ask that they disclose this additional information and their affiliation with their parent company to get back on the platform.”

The move by Facebook comes after the company temporarily took down one of Khalek’s videos for Soapbox—about “how Israel uses Palestine as a weapons testing laboratory”—in late December, and only restored it after public outcry. Facebook also was intensely criticized last year for censoring the left-leaning Latin American news network teleSUR English, funded by the Venezuelan government and others, as well as a video about Christopher Columbus’ brutal legacy produced by Double Down News.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

 

 

RIP INF Treaty: Russia’s Victory, America’s Waterloo

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By Dmitry Orlov

Source: Club Orlov

On March 1, 2018 the world learned of Russia’s new weapons systems, said to be based on new physical principles. Addressing the Federal Assembly, Putin explained how they came to be: in 2002 the US withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. At the time, the Russians declared that they will be forced to respond, and were basically told “Do whatever you want.”

And so they did, developing new weapons that no anti-ballistic missile system can ever hope to stop. The new Russian weapons include one that is already on combat duty (Kinzhal), one that is being readied for mass production (Avangard) and several that are currently being tested (Poseidon, Burevestnik, Peresvet, Sarmat). Their characteristics, briefly, are as follows:

• Kinzhal: a hypersonic air-launched cruise missile that flies at Mach 10 (7700 miles per hour) and can destroy both ground installations and ships.

• Avangard: a maneuverable hypersonic payload delivery system for intercontinental ballistic missiles that flies at better than Mach 20 (15300 miles per hour). It has a 740-mile range and can carry a nuclear charge of up to 300 kilotons.

• Poseidon: an autonomous nuclear-powered torpedo with unlimited range that can travel at a 3000-foot depth maintaining a little over 100 knots.

• Burevestnik: a nuclear-powered cruise missile that flies at around 270 miles per hour and can stay in the air for 24 hours, giving it a 6000-mile range.

• Peresvet: a mobile laser complex that can blind drones and satellites, knocking out space and aerial reconnaissance systems.

• Sarmat: a new heavy intercontinental missile that can fly arbitrary suborbital courses (such as over the South Pole) and strike arbitrary points anywhere on the planet. Because it does not follow a predictable ballistic trajectory it is impossible to intercept.

The initial Western reaction to this announcement was an eerie silence. A few people tried to convince anyone who would listen that this was all bluff and computer animation, and that these weapons systems did not really exist. (The animation was of rather low quality, one might add, probably because Russian military types couldn’t possibly imagine that slick graphics, such as what the Americans waste their money on, would make Russia any safer.) But eventually the new weapons systems were demonstrated to work and US intelligence services confirmed their existence.

Forced to react, the Americans, with the EU in tow, tried to cause public relations scandals over some unrelated matter. Such attempts are repeated with some frequency. For instance, after the putsch in the Ukraine caused Crimea to go back to Russia there was the avalanche of hysterical bad press about Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, which the Americans had shot down over Ukrainian territory with the help of Ukrainian military.

Similarly, after Putin’s announcement of new weapons systems, there was an eruption of equally breathless hysterics over the alleged “Novichok” poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter. A couple of Russian tourists, if you recall, were accused of poisoning Skripal by smearing some toxic gas on the doorknob of his house some time after he left it never to return. Perhaps such antics made some people feel better, but opposing new, breakthrough weapons systems by generating fake news does not an adequate response make.

Say what you will about the Russian response to the US pulling out of the ABM treaty, but it was adequate. It was made necessary by two well-known facts. First, the US is known for dropping nuclear bombs on other countries (Hiroshima, Nagasaki). It did so not in self-defense but just to send a message to the USSR that resistance would be futile (a dumb move if there ever was one). Second, the US is known to have repeatedly planned to destroy the USSR using a nuclear first strike. It was prevented from carrying it out time and again, first by a shortage of nuclear weapons, then by the development of Soviet nuclear weapons, then by the development of Soviet ICBMs.

Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” was an attempt to develop a system that would shoot down enough Soviet ICBMs to make a nuclear first strike on the USSR winnable. This work was terminated when Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in December, 1987. But then when Bush Jr. pulled out of the ABM treaty in 2002 it was off to the races again. Last year Putin declared that Russia has won: the Americans can now rest assured that if they ever attack Russia the result will be their complete, guaranteed annihilation, and the Russians can rest secure in the knowledge that the US will never dare to attack them.

But that was just the prelude. The real victory happened on February 2, 2019. This day will be remembered as the day when the Russian Federation decisively defeated the United States in the battle for Eurasia—from Lisbon to Vladivostok and from Murmansk to Mumbai.

So, what did the Americans want, and what did they get instead? They wanted to renegotiate the INF treaty, revise some of the terms and expand it to include China. Announcing that the US is suspending the INF treaty, Trump said: “I hope we’re able to get everybody in a big, beautiful room and do a new treaty that would be much better…” By “everybody” Trump probably meant the US, China and Russia.

Why the sudden need to include China? Because China has an entire arsenal of intermediate-range weapons with a range of 500-5500 (the ones outlawed by the INF treaty) pointed at American military bases throughout the region—in South Korea, Japan and Guam. The INF treaty made it impossible for the US to develop anything that could be deployed at these bases to point back at China.

Perhaps it was Trump’s attempt to practice his New York real-estate mogul’s “art of the deal” among nuclear superpowers, or perhaps it’s because imperial hubris has rotted the brains of just about everyone in the US establishment, but the plan for renegotiating the INF treaty was about as stupid as can be imagined:

1. Accuse Russia of violating the INF treaty based on no evidence. Ignore Russia’s efforts to demonstrate that the accusation is false.

2. Announce pull-out of the INF treaty.

3. Wait a while, then announce that the INF treaty is important and essential. Condescendingly forgive Russia and offer to sign a new treaty, but demand that it include China.

4. Wait while Russia convinces China that it should do so.

5. Sign the new treaty in Trump’s “big, beautiful room.”

So, how did it actually go? Russia instantly announced that it is also pulling out of the INF treaty. Putin ordered foreign minister Lavrov to abstain from all negotiations with the Americans in this matter. He then ordered defense minister Shoigu to build land-based platforms for Russia’s new air and ship-based missile systems—without increasing the defense budget. Putin added that these new land-based systems will only be deployed in response to the deployment of US-made intermediate-range weapons. Oh, and China announced that it is not interested in any such negotiations. Now Trump can have his “big, beautiful room” all to himself.

Why did this happen? Because of the INF treaty, for a long time Russia has had a giant gaping hole in its arsenal, specifically in the 500-5500 km range. It had air-launched X-101/102s, and eventually developed the Kalibr cruise missile, but it had rather few aircraft and ships—enough for defense, but not enough to guarantee that it could reliably destroy all of NATO. As a matter of Russia’s national security, given the permanently belligerent stance of the US, it was necessary for NATO to know that in case of a military conflict with Russia it will be completely annihilated, and that no air defense system will ever help them avoid that fate.

If you look at a map, you will find that having weapons in the 500-5500 km range fixes this problem rather nicely. Draw a circle with a 5500 km radius around the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad; note that it encompasses every single NATO country, North Africa and Middle East. The INF treaty was not necessarily a good deal for Russia even when it was first signed (remember, Gorbachev, who signed it, was a traitor) but it became a stupendously bad deal as NATO started to expand east. But Russia couldn’t pull out of it without triggering a confrontation, and it needed time to recover and rearm.

Already in 2004 Putin announced that “Russia needs a breakthrough in order to have a new generation of weapons and technology.” At the time, Americans ignored him, thinking that Russia could fall apart at any moment and that they will be able to enjoy Russian oil, gas, nuclear fuel and other strategic commodities for free forever even as the Russians themselves go extinct. They thought that even if Russia tried to resist, it would be enough to bribe some traitors—like Gorbachev or Yeltsin—and all would be well again.

Fast-forward 15 years, and is that what we have? Russia has rebuilt and rearmed. Its export industries provide for a positive trade balance even in absence of oil and gas exports. It is building three major export pipelines at the same time—to Germany, Turkey and China. It is building nuclear generating capacity around the world and owns a lion’s share of the world’s nuclear industry. The US can no longer keep the lights on without Russian nuclear fuel imports. The US has no new weapons systems with which to counter Russia’s rearmament. Yes, it talks about developing some, but all it has at this point are infinite money sinks and lots of PowerPoint presentations. It no longer has the brains to do the work, or the time, or the money.

Part of Putin’s orders upon pulling out of the INF treaty was to build land-based medium-range hypersonic missiles. That’s a new twist: not only will it be impossible to intercept them, but they will reduce NATO’s remaining time to live, should it ever attack Russia, from minutes to seconds. The new Poseidon nuclear-powered torpedo was mentioned too: even if an attack on Russia succeeds, it will be a Pyrrhic one, since subsequent 100-foot nuclear-triggered tsunamis will wipe clean both coasts of the United States for hundreds of miles inland, effectively reducing the entire country to slightly radioactive wasteland.

Not only has the US lost its ability to attack, it has also lost its ability to threaten. Its main means of projecting force around the world is its navy, and Poseidon reduces it to a useless, slow-moving pile of scrap steel. It would take just a handful of Poseidons quietly shadowing each US aircraft carrier group to zero out the strategic value of the US Navy no matter where in the world it is deployed.

Without the shackles of the INF treaty, Russia will be able to fully neutralize the already obsolete and useless NATO and to absorb all of Europe into its security sphere. European politicians are quite malleable and will soon learn to appreciate the fact that good relations with Russia and China are an asset while any dependence on the US, moving forward, is a huge liability. Many of them already understand which way the wind is blowing.

It won’t be a difficult decision for Europe’s leaders to make. On the one pan of the scale there is the prospect of a peaceful and prosperous Greater Eurasia, from Lisbon to Vladivostok and from Murmansk to Mumbai, safe under Russia’s nuclear umbrella and tied together with China’s One Belt One Road.

On the other pan of the scale there is a certain obscure former colony lost in the wilds of North America, imbued with an unshakeable faith in its own exceptionalism even as it grows ever weaker, more internally conflicted and more chaotic, but still dangerous, though mostly to itself, and run by a bloviating buffoon who can’t tell the difference between a nuclear arms treaty and a real estate deal. It needs to be quietly and peacefully relegated to the outskirts of civilization, and then to the margins of history.

Trump should keep his own company in his “big, beautiful room,” and avoid doing anything anything even more tragically stupid, while saner minds quietly negotiate the terms for an honorable capitulation. The only acceptable exit strategy for the US is to quietly and peacefully surrender its positions around the world, withdraw into its own geographic footprint and refrain from meddling in the affairs of Greater Eurasia.

Can Venezuela and its neighbours survive the coming war?

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Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro (C), speaks to a crowd of supporters to announce his is breaking off diplomatic ties with the United States, during a gathering in Caracas on January 23, 2019.  (Photo by Luis ROBAYO / AFP)

The crisis which is destabilising Venezuela, like those which are beginning in Nicaragua and Haïti, needs to be analysed in order to enable us to address it. Thierry Meyssan reminds us of three interpretative hypotheses and argues in favour of one of them. He evokes the US strategy and the ways in which it may be countered.

By Thierry Meyssan

Source: Voltairenet.org

Today, Venezuela is divided between two legitimacies – that of Constitutional President Nicolas Maduro and that of the President of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó.

Guaido nominated himself as interim President, allegedly by virtue of articles 223 and 233 of the Constitution. We only need to read these articles to see that they in no way apply to his case, and that he can not claim from them any legitimacy for the post he seeks to usurp. Despite that, he has been accredited by the United States, the Lima Group and part of the European Union.

Some of Nicolas Maduro’s supporters claim that Washington is reproducing the overthrow of a leftist government, just as it did against Salvadore Allende in 1973, during the mandate of President Richard Nixon.

Others, reacting to the revelations of Max Blumenthal and Dan Cohen about the career path of Juan Guaidó [1], believe on the contrary that this is a colour revolution similar to those we saw under the presidency of George W. Bush.

Facing an aggression by an enemy who is far stronger than oneself, it is crucial to identify its objectives and understand its methods. Only those who are capable of anticipating the attacks they are about to suffer will have any chance of surviving.

Three dominant hypotheses

It is perfectly logical for Latin-Americans to compare what they are presently experiencing to what they have already known, like the Chilean coup d’etat of 1973. But it would be risky for Washington to reproduce the same scenario 46 years later – it would be an error, because today, everyone is familiar with the details of this deception.

Furthermore, the revelation concerning Juan Guaidó’s connections to the National Endowment for Democracy and Gene Sharp’s team reminds us even more of a colour revolution, since Venezuela has already experienced such an event, which failed in 2007. Specifically, it would be dangerous for Washington, 12 years later, to attempt to reprise a plan which has already backfired.

In order to understand Washington’s intentions, we must first familiarise ourselves with its battle plan.

On 29 October 2001, just one and a half months after the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, US Secretary for Defense Donald Rumsfeld created the Office of Force Transformation, whose mission was to revolutionise the US armed forces, to change their mentality in order to respond to the radically new objective of confirming US supremacy world-wide. He handed this job to Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, who had already accomplished the networking of US military units, and had participated, in the 1990’s, with the elaboration of a doctrine of digital warfare (Network-centric warfare) [2].

Cebrowski arrived with a pre-planned strategy which he presented not only to the Pentagon, but to military academies all over the place. Although it was very important, his work within the armed forces was not covered by the media until the publication of an article in Vanity Fair. Thereafter, his explanations were published by his assistant Thomas Barnett [3]. It goes without saying that these documents were not necessarily faithful to the Pentagon’s ideas, which they make no attempt to explain, but to justify. Nonetheless, the main idea is that the United States seize control of the natural resources of half of the world, not to use them for themselves, but to decide who would be allowed to use them. In order to do so, they would have to deprive these areas of any political power other than their own, and therefore destroy all the state structures present in the region.

Officially, this strategy has never been implemented. Nonetheless, what we have been witnessing for the last twenty years corresponds exactly to Barnett’s book. First of all, in the 1980’s and 1990’s, there was the destruction of the region of the « African Great Lakes ». We mostly remember the Rwandan genocide and its 900,000 dead, but the entire region was devastated by a long series of wars which caused the death of six million people. What is truly astonishing is that twenty years later, many states have not recovered sovereignty over all their territory. This episode pre-dates the Rumsfeld-Cebrowski doctrine. We do not know if the Pentagon had planned what happened, or if it was while they were destroying these states that they conceived of their plan. Later on, in the years between 2000 and 2010, we witnessed the destruction of the « Greater Middle East », this time according to the Rumsfeld-Cebrowski doctrine. Of course, we may choose to believe that all this was just a succession of « democratic » interventions, civil wars and revolutions. But apart from the fact that the populations concerned contest the dominant narrative of these events, we note that in these cases also, the state structures were destroyed and peace did not return with the end of military operations. As of now, the Pentagon is evacuating the « Greater Middle East » and is preparing its deployment in the « Caribbean Basin ».

Many elements indicate that our previous understanding of the wars of George W. Bush and Barack Obama was mistaken, while they corresponded perfectly to the Rumsfeld-Cebrowski doctrine. This reading of the events is therefore not the fruit of a coincidence with Barnett’s thesis, and forces us to rethink what we witnessed.

If we adopt this method of thought, we have to consider that the process of destruction of the Caribbean Basin began with the decree by President Barack Obama, on 9 March 2015, according to which Venezuela is a threat to the national security of the United States of America [4]. This may seem rather old, but in reality it is not. For example, President George W. Bush signed the Syrian Accountability Act in 2003, but military operations in Syria only began eight years later, in 2011. This interval was necessary for Washington to create the conditions for the troubles.

The attacks against the left before 2015

If this analysis is accurate, we have to consider that the events prior to 2015 (the coup d’etat against President Hugo Chávez in 2002, the attempt at a colour revolution in 2007, Operation Jericho in February 2015, and the first demonstrations by the guarimbas) corresponded to a different logic, while those that occurred afterwards (guarimbas terrorism in 2017) are part of the plan.

My logic is based also on my understanding of these elements.

Thus, in 2002, I published an analysis of the coup d’etat which revealed the role of the United States behind the Fedecamaras (Venezuelan company management) [5]. President Hugo Chávez wanted to check my information, and sent two emissaries to Paris. One of them has since become a General, and the other is currently one of the most senior personalities in the country. My work was used by prosecutor Danilo Anderson for his investigation. He was assassinated by the CIA in 2004.

In 2007, a number of Trotskyite students began a movement to protest the non-renewal of the licence of the Caracas radio-television company RCTV. We know today, thanks to Blumenthal and Cohen, that Juan Guaidó was already implicated, and that he had received training by disciples of the non-violence theorist, Gene Sharp. Rather than repressing the excesses of the movement, President Hugo Chávez, on the occasion of the ceremony of the signature of the ALBA agreement (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America) on 3 June, read for twenty minutes from an old article that I had written about Gene Sharp and his conception of non-violence in the service of NATO and the CIA [6]. Realising the manipulation to which they had been submitted, a large number of demonstrators withdrew from the combat. Clumsily denying the facts, Sharp wrote to the President and then to myself. This initiative created confusion amongst the US left wing, for whom Sharp was a respectable personality with no links to the US government. Professor Stephen Zunes took his defence, but when faced with proof, Sharp closed his institute, leaving his place to Otpor (Resistance) and Canvas (Centre for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies). [7].

Let’s return to the present period. Of course, the recent attempt to assassinate President Nicolas Maduro reminds us of the way in which President Salvadore Allende was pushed to suicide. Of course, the demonstrations convened by the President of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, reminds us of a colour revolution. But this is not at all contradictory to my analysis. Let’s note that an attempt to assassinate Mouamar Kadhafi closely preceded military operations against Libya. And when the disciples of Gene Sharp supervised the first demonstrations against President Hosni Moubarak in Egypt, they even distributed an Arab version of their booklet, which had already been used in other countries [8]. But as further events were to show, it was neither a coup d’etat or a colour revolution.

Preparing for war

If my analysis is correct – and for the moment, everything seems to confirm it – we have to prepare for a war not only in Venezuela, but throughout the Caribbean Basin. Nicaragua and Haïti are already destabilised.

This war will be imposed from the exterior. Its aim will no longer be to overthrow leftist governments for the profit of right wing parties, even if appearances will at first be confusing. The logic of events will make no distinction between one side or another. Little by little, the whole society will be threatened, without the distinction of ideology or social class. Identically, it will become impossible for other states in the region to shelter from the storm. Even those who believe that they can protect themselves by serving as a rear base for military operations will be partially destroyed. For example, even though the Press hardly ever mentioned it, entire cities were wiped out in the region of Qatif, in Saudi Arabia, even though this country was Washington’s main ally in the « Greater Middle East ».

Based on the conflicts of the African Great Lakes and the Greater Middle East, this war should unfold by stages.

- First of all, the destruction of symbols of the modern state, by attacking the statues and museums dedicated to Hugo Chávez. This should not cause any victims, but would destabilise the mental representations of the population. Then the supply of arms and remuneration for the combatants in order to organise demonstrations which will degenerate.
- The Press will supply – after the fact – unverifiable explanations of the crimes blamed on the government and against which allegedly peaceful demonstrators had allegedly revolted. It is important that the police believe that they had been the targets of shots fired from the crowd, and that the crowd believe that they had been the targets of shots fired by the police, because the aim of the operation is to sow division.
- The third stage will be to organise bloody attacks all over the country. Very few men will be necessary to implement this stage, it will suffice that two or three teams move around the region.
- It will only be at this point that it will become useful to send in foreign mercenaries. During the last war, the United States sent at least 130,000 foreigners to Iraq and Syria, to which were added 120,000 local combatants. These armies were numerous, but poorly taught and trained.

It is, however, possible to defend oneself, since Syria managed to do so. Several initiatives will have to be taken urgently :

- Already, on the initiative of General Jacinto Perez Arcay and the President of the Constituent Assembly, Diosdado Cabello, the senior officers of the Venezuelan armies are studying new forms of combat (4th generation warfare). But military delegations will have to visit Syria to see for themselves how the events occurred. This is very important, since these wars are unlike any previous conflicts. For example, in Damascus, the major part of the city is intact, as if nothing had happened, but several neighbourhoods are totally devastated, like Stalingrad after the Nazi invasion. This supposes the use of particular combat techniques.
- It is essential to establish the national union of all patriots. The President must become the ally of his opposition, and include certain of its leaders in his government. The problem is not to know whether or not we appreciate President Maduro – it is essential to fight under his command to save the country.
- The army must form a popular militia. There is already such a force in Venezuela, numbering close to two million men, but they are mostly untrained. On principle, military men do not like to hand guns to civilians, but only civilians are capable of defending their own neighbourhood, since they know the area and everyone who lives there.
- Major work must be done to secure state, army and hospital buildings.

All this must be done as quickly as possible. These measures take a long time to implement, and the enemy is almost ready.

 

Translation: Pete Kimberley

What happens to cognitive diversity when everyone is more WEIRD?

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By Kensy Cooperrider

Source: aeon

For centuries, Inuit hunters navigated the Arctic by consulting wind, snow and sky. Now they use GPS. Speakers of the aboriginal language Gurindji, in northern Australia, used to command 28 variants of each cardinal direction. Children there now use the four basic terms, and they don’t use them very well. In the arid heights of the Andes, the Aymara developed an unusual way of understanding time, imagining the past as in front of them, and the future at their backs. But for the youngest generation of Aymara speakers – increasingly influenced by Spanish – the future lies ahead.

These are not just isolated changes. On all continents, even in the world’s remotest regions, indigenous people are swapping their distinctive ways of parsing the world for Western, globalised ones. As a result, human cognitive diversity is dwindling – and, sadly, those of us who study the mind had only just begun to appreciate it.

In 2010, a paper titled ‘The Weirdest People in the World?’ gave the field of cognitive science a seismic shock. Its authors, led by the psychologist Joe Henrich at the University of British Columbia, made two fundamental points. The first was that researchers in the behavioural sciences had almost exclusively focused on a small sliver of humanity: people from Western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic societies. The second was that this sliver is not representative of the larger whole, but that people in London, Buenos Aires and Seattle were, in an acronym, WEIRD.

But there is a third fundamental point, and it was the psychologist Paul Rozin at the University of Pennsylvania who made it. In his commentary on the 2010 article, Rozin noted that this same WEIRD slice of humanity was ‘a harbinger of the future of the world’. He had seen this trend in his own research. Where he found cross-cultural differences, they were more pronounced in older generations. The world’s young people, in other words, are converging. The signs are unmistakable: the age of global WEIRDing is upon us.

This marks a major change of course for our species. For tens of thousands of years, as we fanned out across the globe, we adapted to radically different niches, and created new types of societies; in the process, we developed new practices, frameworks, technologies and conceptual systems. But then, some time in the past few centuries, we reached an inflection point. A peculiar cognitive toolkit that had been consolidated in the industrialising West began to gain global traction. Other tools were abandoned. Diversity started to ebb.

The WEIRD toolkit comprises our most basic frameworks for understanding the world. It touches on every aspect of experience: how we relate to space and time, to nature, to each other; how we filter our experiences and allocate our attention. Many of these mental frameworks are so ingrained we don’t notice them. They are like the glasses we’ve forgotten we’re wearing.

Consider our obsession with numbers. In global, industrialised cultures we take it for granted that we can – and should – quantify every aspect of experience. We count steps and calories, track interest rates and follower counts. Meanwhile, people in some small-scale societies don’t bother to track how old they are. Some couldn’t because their languages don’t have numbers beyond four or five. But WEIRD quantiphilia is quickly catching on. Hunter-gatherers in the Amazon are now eagerly learning Portuguese number words. In Papua New Guinea, once home to a rich variety of ‘body count’ systems – numbered landmarks on body, usually ranging to about 30 – children are learning English numbers instead.

Another peculiar part of the WEIRD toolkit is our fixation on time. We budget it, struggle to save it, agonise over losing it. We count days, hours and seconds. We are always oriented to exactly where we are on the long arrow of history. In the United States, for example, when doctors screen patients for cognitive impairment, one of the first questions they ask is the year, month and date.

To many in non-Western, non-industrialised groups, this fixation might seem odd. One early 20th-century ethnographer, Alfred Irving Hallowell, observed that the Ojibwe of native North America would be unruffled by not knowing whether it was a Thursday or Saturday. What would distress them, he remarked in 1957, is not knowing whether they were facing south or east. Not so for WEIRD people: our fixation on time appears to be balanced by a breathtaking obliviousness to space. A 2010 study found that Stanford students could not reliably point to North.

Now, such obliviousness to space is going global. Satellite-based navigation systems are displacing traditional techniques worldwide. It’s happening in the Arctic, as we have seen, but also in the Pacific. In Micronesia, seafaring was once accomplished with jawdropping precision by using a conceptual system so different from Western ones that scientists struggled to understand it. Today, this masterwork lives largely in museum exhibits.

Everyday ways of talking about space are undergoing a sea change, too. Very often, people in small-scale communities prefer to describe space using cardinal directions or local landmarks – often slopes, rivers or salient winds. Some of these systems, like the Gurindji compass terms, are highly elaborated. In contrast, WEIRD folks prefer to carve up the world in terms of their own bodily axes – their lefts and rights, fronts and backs. This ego-based frame of reference now appears to be taking hold broadly, spreading along with the influence of global languages such as Spanish.

Humanity is getting more ego-centred in other ways, too. It has long been observed that Western adults – and Americans in particular – privilege the individual over the group. We give our children unique names; we put them in bedrooms of their own; we emphasise their autonomy and needs. People in many other societies, most famously in East Asia, have historically privileged the collective instead. But Western-style individualism is gaining a foothold, even in the East. Japanese people have started giving their children unique names, too. A recent analysis of 78 countries found that, over the past half-century, markers of individualism have increased in the majority of them.

These are just some of the frameworks that are being displaced as global WEIRDing accelerates. Elsewhere, taxonomies, metaphors and mnemonics are evaporating. Many were never really documented in the first place. Researchers still don’t fully understand the conceptual system motivating khipus – the intricate string recording devices once made by the Inkas – but there’s no one left to explain it.

Human cognitive diversity joins a number of other forms of diversity that are disappearing. Diversity of mammals and plants, of languages and cuisines. But the loss of cognitive diversity raises issues all its own. Cognition is invisible and intangible, making it harder to track and harder to record. You can’t pin mindsets to a specimen board, or store them in a seed vault. It’s not easy to pose ways of knowing in a diorama. Thinking leaves footprints, of course – in language, in artifacts, in knotted string – but the act itself is ephemeral.

The loss of cognitive diversity raises an ethical dilemma, too. The forces that are eroding cognitive diversity – the forces of global WEIRDing – are often the same forces that are raising literacy levels worldwide, promoting access to education and opportunity in indigenous communities, and connecting people across the globe. Few would deny that these are positive developments for humanity. So we are left to ask, not only whether we can slow the loss of human cognitive diversity, but also whether we should even try.

Cognitive scientists such as myself are not used to grappling with these kinds of questions. Nor are we used to thinking about big trends in the human journey. But global WEIRDing is a trend we can’t ignore, one with scientific, humanistic and ethical implications. For much of human history, one of our most distinctive traits as a species has been our sheer diversity. But then our course began to change – and it’s time that cognitive scientists joined the conversation about where we’re going.