Tag Archives: imperialism

People Who Publicly Fret About Assange Rape Allegations Are Lying

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

A few hours ago I stumbled across a tweet by Huffington Post UK editor Basia Cummings which made my blood boil. Actress and activist Pamela Anderson had just spoken to the press with WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson about their visit with Assange at Belmarsh prison, decrying the WikiLeaks founder’s cruel treatment and unjust prosecution. Basia Cummings took this opportunity to call her social media followers in to make fun of Anderson’s clothing.

“Pamela Anderson arrives at Belmarsh to visit Julian Assange wearing… a bespoke cape/blanket referencing ‘Cromwell’ and free speech’. It’s a look,” Cummings said.

But what really got me were the comments the tweet elicited.

“Is it possible to unwank over someone?” asked one user.

“Pamela Anderson arrives at Belmarsh to visit Julian Assange to supply him with some material for his cell wank bank,” said another.

“Cum blanket,” said another.

“She banged Kid Rock. Enough said,” said another.

This is just a small sampling from a quick skim. There are many, many others. I won’t quote them all.

I found this so deeply illustrative of the way mainstream liberals throw every value they claim to stand for right in the garbage as soon as it becomes an obstacle to their petty partisan attacks. They all warned that Trump was campaigning on a platform of xenophobia, homophobia and demagoguery, but as soon as he was elected they began launching phony Russiagate attacks which themselves were rife with xenophobia, homophobia and demagoguery. Liberal pundits who rightly criticized Bush for his unforgivable invasion of Iraq now attack Trump for being insufficiently hawkish toward Russia and its allies. These mindless automatons don’t actually stand for anything beyond blind partisan loyalty.

In the same way that they will happily wipe their asses with any of their pretend values the second it becomes politically convenient to do so, mainstream liberals will also fabricate grave, solemn concerns about things they never actually cared about before as soon as it can be used as an angle of partisan attack.

Feminist writer Naomi Wolf began her excellent 2010 essay titled “J’Accuse: Sweden, Britain, and Interpol Insult Rape Victims Worldwide” with the words, “How do I know that Interpol, Britain and Sweden’s treatment of Julian Assange is a form of theater? Because I know what happens in rape accusations against men that don’t involve the embarrassing of powerful governments.” Wolf argued that “men are pretty much never treated the way Assange is being treated in the face of sex crime charges,” and she was absolutely correct.

As a survivor of multiple sexual assaults, I have found it unspeakably infuriating the way this same patriarchal imperialist system which has allowed rape culture to thrive throughout the entirety of its existence has suddenly become deeply, deeply concerned about plot hole-riddled and completely unproven allegations against a man who just so happens to have published humiliating truths about that very same imperialist system. This same warmongering power structure which has never given a shit about women beyond our ability to fly a stealth bomber and squeeze new recruits out of our vaginas suddenly has the full force of its propaganda machine whipping liberals into a hysteria about allegations of acts that aren’t even illegal in the nations those liberals live in. Acts that these liberals have never even thought about pushing to make laws against in their own governments.

Do you know how you can be absolutely certain that anyone you see on social media rending their garments about Assange’s Swedish allegations is completely full of shit? Because no matter how hard you search through their post history, you will never, ever find any similarly enthusiastic push to ban the actions that Assange is accused of in their own government. In their own land, where their own daughters and sons will be impacted. They focus solely on shaky allegations against a target of the CIA and the Pentagon which are alleged to have happened in Sweden, a nation with very different sexual consent laws than the nations of these English-speaking concern trolls.

Without conceding that any part of the unproven allegations against Assange are true, it’s important to note that the United States, from which many of these Assange haters express their grave concern about Assange’s Swedish accusations, has no laws whatsoever about non-consensual condom removal, and other western judicial systems are barely even beginning to touch on the subject. None of these nations convict men for initiating sex while the woman is half-asleep, as Assange’s rape allegation asserts, and virtually every woman you know has had sex initiated with her by a sexual partner while she was half-asleep. Yet none of the blue-checkmarked journalists you see calling Assange a “rapist” on social media have ever written any articles demanding that laws be passed in their own countries calling for women to receive legal protection from this.

The people pretending to care about these allegations do not care about rape, and they do not care about women. I recently had my Twitter privileges suspended by someone who called me a “rape apologist” for not automatically subscribing to the “believe all women” meme in the case of a known CIA target, and, when I informed him that I myself am a rape victim, this man called me a liar. I went off on him, and he reported me. This man has never cared about rape or women, and it’s entirely likely that he’s done things to women that push the same boundaries on sexual consent he’s accusing Assange of doing, or worse.

I suspect that goes the same for a lot of the concern trolling Assange-hating men I encounter online whose suddenly holier-than-thou position on initiating sex with a sleepy woman you’ve just been intimate with probably does not line up all that well with their own sexual past. I mean, let’s get real. I’m a woman, my friends are women, I’ve been in a lot of book clubs and mom’s groups and out on a lot of girl’s nights and I know that if you want to get a conversation really fired up, just mention how annoying it is when a bloke wakes you up prodding you with his dick. It’s relatable and a rich vein to mine anecdote-wise. This is a universal experience for a western woman, and yeah, I think it’s rapey and gross and I would love for it to stop, but don’t pretend you care about that now any more than you did before you realized it was a way you could smear Assange. Be real. If you weren’t campaigning for it to be outlawed in your own state or country before, you need to at least be making noises about it now first, and you know and I know that that simply isn’t happening.

In fact, as the years pass, it is becoming entirely possible that the publicity around the allegations against Assange will not change one thing about rape law in any of the western countries which pretend to be so outraged by it other than to be considered a useful hack for smearing a journalist for exposing the patriarchal imperialist system under which rape culture continues to thrive. It has been nine years; nothing has changed. I think we can safely say that after nine years and no change that this has never been an honest concern for the health and well-being of the women involved and for women in general, because if it was then those laws would be ubiquitous across western democracies. Yet again, the suffering of women will be used by the powerful to hide their crimes and entrench more deeply the suffering for the women who work tirelessly as human shields protecting their children from the effects of war and poverty in a predatory capitalist system which is incapable of valuing women’s work.

Of course we should want these things to be illegal. Of course it should be illegal to deliberately have unprotected penetration without consent. Of course it should be illegal to initiate sex without fully awake and enthusiastic consent. Of course we should all want to live in a world where everyone is protected from any sexual interaction happening without their permission. But these people are not interested in creating that world. These people are interested in supporting the same rapey power establishment which has no regard for the sovereignty of entire nations, much less the individual sovereignty of womens’ bodies. They pretend to be on the side of women, but they are actually on the side of the worst aspects of patriarchy, because they have formed an egoic identification with the political structures which are built upon those aspects. That’s what concern trolling is.

This is just one of the many ways in which authentic feminism, authentic advocacy for the real interests of real women, has been co-opted for the benefit of a depraved establishment which has never cared about women and never will. We see it in the way the mass media celebrates women ascending to leadership positions of the military-industrial complex and the National Guard, and the way the presidential candidacy of a woman who embodies all the sickest aspects of the patriarchy was billed as a path to victory for feminism. The healthy impulse to elevate a gender that had an enslaved status in our society since the dawn of civilization has been hijacked by perverse agendas, and it needs to be reclaimed.

Whenever you see anyone claiming to be deeply, deeply concerned about the Swedish allegations against Assange, ask them what they’ve been doing to fight for legal changes which protect women from the things Assange is accused of doing. Then watch them squirm.

For more info on the gaping plot holes in the “Assange is a rapist” smear, check out this section from my mega-article Debunking All The Assange Smears.

Understanding the American Dictatorship

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: Washington’s Blog

The American dictatorship is by the aristocracy of the country’s 585 billionaires, and has been scientifically proven beyond any doubt, now, not only in the classic Gilens and Page study, which examined thousands of bills in Congress and their money-backers and their ultimate outcomes (passage or failure to pass), during the studied period, 1981-2002. But also another (though less rigorous) study suggests that this control of the U.S. Government by America’s billionaires is getting even worse. So, America is clearly a dictatorship, by America’s aristocracy.

This is not just one or the other of America’s two Parties — Democrats versus Republicans — representing only the super-rich. Both of the Parties do, but the Democratic Party represents liberal billionaires, while the Republican Party represents conservative billionaires. Each Party represents a different faction of the billionaires.

The conservative faction is well represented by Donald Trump, whose swash-buckling rhetoric — “I’d take the oil!” in Iraq, and in Syria, and in Venezuela, etc. — is more blatantly uncouth than Barack Obama’s more gentlemanly rhetoric, but not basically different than Obama’s even bloodier grabbing of Honduras, Ukraine, Libya, and Syria were. The prominent Obama-backer George Soros, however, was demanding that banks, backed up by taxpayers, should kick in an extra $50 billion to enable him and other billionaires to exploit that country successfully. (He said this while Ukraine was spending most of the money that it did have trying to conquer the people in the far-eastern part of the country who refused to accept Obama’s imposed ruler who replaced the democratically elected President for whom they had voted over 90%.) So, ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ are both neoconservative, or the old term for that was “imperialistic.” In such matters (international matters), the billionaires very much are unified, and their news-media also are. And they all do represent the billionaires — never the public.

One billionaire, the owner of the fake-progressive “The Intercept” news-site, was exposed recently for his grabbingness. The excellent and honest journalists Alexander Rubinstein and Max Blumenthal headlined at one of the few honest news-media, Mint Press, “Pierre Omidyar’s Funding of Pro-Regime-Change Networks and Partnerships with CIA Cutouts”, and reported:

A select group of national news ‘stakeholders’ gathered at an undisclosed location for what was described as a “semi-secret” workshop somewhere in Canada on January 26. The meeting had been convened to determine how and to whom a ‘news industry bailout’ of $645 million in Canadian government subsidies to private and supposedly independent media outlets would be disbursed. … 

Jesse Brown, a Canadian journalist who participated in the meeting, complained that the first thing he noticed about it “was that one major public ‘stakeholder’ wasn’t represented: the public.” Inside what amounted to a smoke filled room that was off limits to most Canadian citizens, Ben Scott — a former Obama administration official who also served in Hillary Clinton’s State Department — presided over the discussions. Today, as the director of policy and advocacy for the Omidyar Network, Scott works for one of the most quietly influential billionaires. …

Pierre Omidyar, the ebay founder [is] best known for his sponsorship of The Intercept, a flashy progressive publication that possesses the classified documents exfiltrated by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Unlike rival Silicon Valley billionaires Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, and Eric Schmidt, Omidyar has mostly managed to keep his influential role in media below the radar. … Samantha Power, the former U.S. ambassador to the UN and liberal interventionist guru, has explicitly praised Omidyar as someone who is following in the footsteps of Soros.

While Samantha Power was Obama’s U.N. Representative, she joined with two other countries, Ukraine and Canada, to oppose a U.N. resolution condemning nazism and all forms of racism. (Only three nations opposed it at the U.N., and these were the three.) When Donald Trump became America’s President, his U.N. Representative, Nikki Haley, likewise was one of only three nations at the U.N. who opposed a similar resolution.

So, perhaps the only people in U.S. and Canada who don’t know that their Governments are among only three that march ideologically in today’s lockstep with the Axis powers that lost World War II, are those three nazi-supporting countries’ own citizens. What media will tell their citizens the truth about this? Who owns the major media, and who finances politicians’ careers there, in the three-or-so brazenly fascist and even pro-nazi countries — the three that vote shamelessly for it?

The extraordinarily fine Rubenstein-Blumenthal article continued:

While backing media outlets around the world that produce news and commentary, Omidyar supports a global cartel of self-styled fact-checking groups that determine which outlets are legitimate and which are “fake.” He has also thrown his money behind murky initiatives like the non-profit backing New Knowledge, the data firm that waged one of the most devious disinformation campaigns in any recent American election campaign; and he is a key backer of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalism (ICIJ), the outfit that holds the Panama Papers and oversees the strategic dissemination of that leaked trove of financial files to hand-picked journalists.

And this is only on the liberal side of the U.S. regime.

The present article is being submitted to all major and most of the smaller national news media throughout the U.S. and its allied countries. The sites that publish it will be the only national and international news-media worth subscribing to, because all the rest are simply censoring-out these basic truths — and are labeling as ‘fake news’ the few honest sites, such as the one you are reading now, the ones that publish such news.

The American dictatorship can’t be accurately understood by relying mainly upon the ‘news’ that the billionaires’ sites publish. That’s very sad, but it’s true. It’s bad news, but it is real news, and not (like the billionaires’ sites call it but actually they themselves are) “fake news” sites. Maybe they publish non-controversial news honestly, but that’s about all of the truth that their owners will allow.

The American dictatorship is increasingly becoming a lock-down against truth. No matter how ugly one might imagine it to be, it’s worse. No solution to this vast problem is being presented here, but the first step toward solving any problem is to understand accurately what that problem actually is, and how it actually functions. In the present case, it’s no malfunction. It’s not a mistake. It’s instead a plan. And it is very competently being imposed — by the billionaires’ agents, against the public. That’s how dictatorships normally are imposed, and that’s how they’re imposed here. Mussolini called it “corporationism.” The U.S. has become its center.

Assange and the Unforgivable Sin of Disemboweling Official Narratives

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

The entire global status quo is on the cusp of the S-Curve decline phase.

There is really only one unforgivable sin in the political realm, and that’s destroying the official narrative by revealing the facts of the matter. This is why whistleblowers who make public the secret machinery of the elaborately artful lies underpinning all official narratives are hounded to the ends of the Earth.

Employees of state entities such as Ellsberg, Manning and Snowden are bound by vows of secrecy and threatened by the promise of severe punishment. Outsiders such as Assange are even further beyond the pale because they can’t be accused of being traitors, as they never took the vows of secrecy required by the Deep State.

The single most damaging revelation to all the elaborate lies that make up official narratives is the truth revealed in official emails, documents and conversations. This is why virtually every document and correspondence is now “classified,” so anyone releasing even a mundane scrap can be sentenced to rot in federal prison.

In a recent C-SPAN interview, author Nomi Prins explained the incredible difficulty of accessing papers in presidential libraries now due to virtually everything being classified. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) applications must be filed, and researchers must wait years to gain access to routine correspondence that was freely available to all a decade or so ago.

Official paranoia has a 100% correlation with the amount of damage done to official narratives by any leaks of the facts of the matter. What are they so afraid of? Here’s the dynamic in play: the more fragile the narrative, the greater the dependence on half-truths and lies, the greater the official urgency to crush all whistleblowers and maintain a Stasi-like vigilance against any murmurs of dissent or doubt.

If the entire contraption wasn’t so vulnerable to exposure and so dependent on lies, why the infinite paranoia? This paranoia extends past the present system of lies into the past, as exposing the lies in decades past calls into question the official narratives of today.

Any doubt is extremely dangerous, as if even a single thread is pulled loose, the entire fabric of ginned-up statistics, false assurances, half-truths and outright lies unravels. Once the Pentagon Papers revealed the facts of the war in Vietnam, support for the official narrative collapsed essentially overnight.

In the immortal words of Jean-Claude Juncker, when it becomes serious you have to lie, and it’s now serious all the time.

The entire global status quo is on the cusp of the S-Curve decline phase. Hence the vulnerability to disruption of its official narratives and the panicky paranoia of its handlers.

 

Coup Attempt in Venezuela: What You’re Not Being Told

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By Derrick Broze

Source: The Conscious Resistance

As self-proclaimed “Interim President” Juan Guaidó attempted to stage a military coup in Venezuela, the country’s U.N. ambassador declared President Nicolas Maduro victorious and called the United States a “rogue nation.”

The turbulent situation that has been unfolding in Venezuela for the last few years reached new heights on Tuesday as opposition leader and self-declared “Interim President” Juan Guaidó attempted to wrangle power away from Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, in what many are calling an attempted coup. Early Tuesday morning, Guaidó gave a press conference declaring that he has the support of the Venezuelan people and military, and demanded that Maduro step down. Guaidó also called on Venezuelans to take to the streets and call for an end to Maduro’s reign as president.

During the day’s events, cameras caught armored vehicles, reportedly belonging to the Bolivian military, running into crowds of protesters. Human Rights Watch (HRW) tweeted that 25 peopled were detained and dozens were wounded. HRW also noted that Venezuelan authorities shut down two international television channels and censored one radio station. “The regime should know that it will be held accountable for these abuses,” tweeted José Miguel Vivanco, Executive Director of HRW’s America Division.

Meanwhile, Venezuela’s U.N. ambassador Samuel Moncada held a press conference stating that President Maduro has “defeated” opposition leader Juan Guaidó and his supporters. Moncada stated “the country is right now in a situation of perfect normality.” Moncada criticized U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for not supporting Maduro’s government against Guaidó.

Moncada also attacked the United States for what he said was another example of their interventionist policies, singling out President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence for their support of Guaidó. “This is one of the most strange and weird situations we are in now, which the superpower of the world is the main rogue state going around, without care, destroying countries, invading countries, and threatening with the use of force,” Moncada stated.

The Ambassador to the UN also noted that the United States’ use of sanctions amounts to an act of war and only hurts the Venezuelan people. “Sanctions kill, as simple as that. Sanctions are criminal sanctions, are weapons of mass destruction. You don’t see the smoke, but you see the effect, you see the deleterious effect of killing and suffering,” Moncada said. “The sanctions use banks sanction, sanctions use ships, sanctions use insurance companies, and financial blockades. They cannot just say that they are concerned about liberty or freedom or the children in Venezuela, and then exercise a ghastly, nasty policy of calculated cruelty. They are acting like torturers, it is a collective punishment.”

Indeed, the Washington D.C.-based Center for Economic Policy Research published a reportlast week which determined that U.S. sanctions against Venezuela were likely responsible for 40,000 deaths in 2017-2018.

The harsh reality is that Maduro is by no means a perfect leader and his support of censoring media, use of the military to suppress protests (whether engineered or authentic), his suppression of the opposition, and other despicable acts do need to be called out. However, Ambassador Moncada is also correct that the United States does act as an imperialist “rogue” nation, using force on any nation that does not follow the Western Imperialist agenda. Unfortunately, it seems that the Venezuelan people are caught between a leader who is unpopular in some circles and an even more unpopular self-proclaimed “Interim President” with multiple connections to the Western Empire.

Of course, if our readers are unaware of these connections, it is because the corporate media (CNN, WaPo, The Hill, and others) have been running non-stop coverage of why Guaidó should be accepted as the leader of Venezuela while ignoring any bit of evidence that the “uprising” might be less than genuine.

Despite the round the clock support of Guaidó, on April 13 the Grayzone exclusively reportedthat a who’s who of Trump advisors, right-wing Latin American officials, and Venezuelan opposition figures met to discuss “Assessing the Use of Military Force in Venezuela.” The meeting was hosted on April 10 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington-based think tank. This meeting included current and former State Department, National Intelligence Council, and National Security Council officials, along with Admiral Kurt Tidd, who was until recently the commander of the US Naval Forces Southern Command, overseeing operations in Central and South America.

The truth is that the Western Empire has been attempting to use Guaidó to install a puppet government in Venezuela. There is also evidence that the U.S. government and its intelligence agencies have attempted to take advantage of electricity blackouts in order to dethrone Maduro. In addition, there are a number of corporations and special interests who stand to benefit from the overthrow of Maduro and the crowning of Guaidó.

Although the American media has failed to report any of the above conflicts, there are still some Americans who are standing against the Venezuelan coup. A group calling itself the Embassy Protection Collective was invited by Venezuela’s government to protect the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington D.C. from illegal seizure by the U.S. government or opposition supporters. The group—which includes members of CODEPINK, Popular Resistance, the Answer Coalition, MintPress News and more—has been working to raise awareness on the attempts by the Western oligarchy to install another puppet government in Venezuela.

The reality of the situation in Venezuela is much more complicated than the likes of CNNwould have the American people believe. Only by dissecting the lies from the American media, the Maduro government, and the Guaidó contingent can we hope to get to the truth and support the people who really matter: The Venezuelan People.

Tackling the ‘Impossible’: Ending Violence

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By Robert J. Burrowes

Whenever, in ordinary circumstances, the subject of violence comes up, most people throw up their hands in horror and comment along the lines that it is ‘in our genes’, ‘nothing can be done about it’ or other words that reflect the powerlessness that most people feel around violence.

It is true that violence is virtually ubiquitous, has a near-infinite variety of manifestations and, at its most grotesque (as nuclear war or run-away climate catastrophe), even threatens human extinction in the near-term.

Nevertheless, anyone who pays attention to the subject of violence in any detail soon discovers that plenty of people are interested in tackling this problem, even if it is ‘impossible’. Moreover, of course, at least some people recognize that while we must tackle each manifestation of violence, understanding the cause of violence is imperative if we are to successfully tackle its many manifestations at their source. To do all of this effectively, however, is a team effort. And hopefully, one day, this team will include all of us.

In the meantime, let me start by telling you a little about some of the people who are already working to end violence by tackling one or more of its many manifestations. These individuals are part of a worldwide network set up to focus on ending violence – ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’ – and they have signed a pledge to do so.

Concerned about US government threats to Iran and Venezuela, several Charter signatories were part of one or both recent peace delegations to Iran and Venezuela respectively. These delegations were designed to open more lines of communication and to demonstrate solidarity with those who do not submit to US hegemony.

The 28-member US peace delegation to Iran from 25 February to 6 March 2019 included long-term nonviolent activists Margaret Flowers, Kevin Zeese and David Hartsough. Unfortunately for David, author of Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist and director of Peaceworkers, his trip didn’t go as planned. If you would like to read a compelling account of his time in Iran with some wonderful Iranians, while learning something about what it means to be on the wrong end of US sanctions, you will find it here: ‘An American Casualty of U.S. Economic Sanctions on Iran’. Glad you got the lifesaving medical treatment from our Iranian friends that you needed David, despite the sanctions! And it is a tragedy that Iran has recently suffered even more, as a result of the devastating floods that have hit the country, with the sanctions cruelly denying them vital emergency assistance. See ‘Stop the ongoing U.S. economic terrorism against Iran and help its people!’

In relation to Venezuela, a 13-member peace and solidarity delegation from North America landed in Caracas, Venezuela on the weekend of 9-10 March 2019. The delegation included leaders of antiwar groups from the US and Canada and, once again, Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers of ‘Popular Resistance’ and ‘Clearing the Fog’ podcasts. You can read an account of this delegation’s findings in Kevin and Margaret’s highly informative report ‘Venezuela: US Imperialism Is Based On Lies And Threats’.

Another initiative to support Venezuelans was outlined in the article ‘A Nonviolent Strategy to Defeat a US Military Invasion of Venezuela’.

Traveling widely to witness and demonstrate solidarity with those on the receiving end of US military violence, another long-term nonviolent activist, Kathy Kelly, recently wrote an article pointing out that ‘Every War Is a War against Children’ in which she evocatively documented examples of what this means for those children living in the war zones we call Yemen and Afghanistan. In an earlier article, Kathy questioned the morality of those corporations – such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics and Raytheon – that profit from the killing their weapons inflict. See ‘Can We Divest from Weapons Dealers?’

Environmental journalist Robert Hunziker continues to fearlessly research and truthfully document the ongoing assaults that humans are inflicting on Earth’s biosphere. In his most recent article ‘The Blue Ocean Event and Collapsing Ecosystems’, Robert straightforwardly explains the content of a recent interview of Dr. Peter Wadhams, the world’s leading Arctic scientist. Robert notes that ‘Currently, the Arctic is heating up about 4 times faster than the rest of the planet… the temp difference between the Arctic and the tropics is dropping precipitously… thus, driving the jet streams less… creating meandering jet streams… in turn, producing extreme weather events throughout the Northern Hemisphere, especially in mid-latitudes where most of the world’s food is grown.’ Robert also notes that the study of ancient ice cores by a team from the British Antarctic Survey, University of Cambridge and University of Birmingham found ‘major reductions in sea ice in the Arctic’ which will crank up (via temperature amplification as a result of no Arctic sea ice) Greenland regional temperatures ‘by 16°C in less than a decade’ with horrific implications for life on Earth. Thank you, Robert, for reporting what the corporate media won’t touch and even many activists find too terrifying to seriously contemplate.

In Chile, Pía Figueroa continues her heavy involvement in efforts to network those committed to peace and nonviolence and to develop media channels that report the truth. Pía reports that ‘Pressenza International Press Agency’, which celebrated its tenth anniversary last November ‘in more than 40 places of the world’, continues to advance its contribution ‘with a journalism focused on peace and nonviolence, to a world in which all human beings have a place and their rights are fully respected, in a framework of disarmed and demilitarized societies, capable of re-establishing the ecological balance through governments of real and participatory democracy.’

Since attending the Media Forum organized in the city of Chongqing, China, by CCTV+ and CGTN, in October last year, Pía has been busy organizing the upcoming Latinamerican Humanist Forum in Santiago with the objective of ‘Building Convergences’, as its slogan points out. It will be held on 10-12 May with the participation of many grassroots and social organizations involved in more than twenty networks of nonviolent action and inspired by the European Humanist Forum that took place in Madrid, Spain, in May 2018.

Anwar A. Khan was born into ‘a liberal Muslim family in Bangladesh’. As a 16 year old college student, he participated in the ‘Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, which resulted in horrendous loss of life, genocide against Bangladesh’s intelligentsia and systematic rapes.’ This experience taught him the nature of the US establishment as he was ‘on the battle field along with so many friends of mine and Indian soldiers to fight back the obnoxious nexus of the Pakistani military regime and the Whitehouse establishment’ to create Bangladesh. Khan Bhai went on to complete a post-graduate education, before embarking on a 43-year (so far) business career, involving many different levels of corporate engagement and which took him to many countries of the world, including Venezuela in 2010 where he met both Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro.

He also writes regularly in his spare time and recently wrote an article highlighting the adverse impact of the lack of infrastructure under which many impoverished countries suffer, given the way in which the global economy functions to exploit them. In the article, he describes an inferno that started on the night of 20 February 2019 in a building at Chawkbazar, a 300-year-old Dhaka neighbourhood, ‘where chemicals for making deodorants and other household uses were illegally stored’. The fire ‘quickly spread to four nearby buildings where many people were trapped. Hundreds of firefighters rushed to the scene but traffic jams in the narrow streets held them up. It took almost 12 hours to bring the fire under control….’ The horrific inferno claimed about 100 lives and more were injured. For the full account, see ‘After Nimtali, now Chawkbazar inferno hell, a crisis of humanity’.

Commenting on the current project that she is organizing with friends, Lori Lightning outlines the rationale behind ‘Bear Bones Parenting’:

‘There’s no course or exam to pass to become a parent, and most try to figure this out once a parent, and usually in an exhausted overwhelmed state. Bedtimes, meals, chores, and healthy open communication all become a task without a trusted framework in place.

‘Based on 51 years of combined wisdom as educators, counselors, health practitioners, moms, step moms and foster moms, Bear Bones Parenting offers an intuitive formula to demystify the basics of parenting and a workbook with tools for reflection and wellness practices to take you actively through day to day living no matter where you are at in your life. You dedicate 15 minutes a day and in trade stop being overwhelmed. A “do it yourself” workbook filled with tools to turn life into what you envision for yourself and your family.

‘Our cast of puppets help to inspire playful reflection on our children’s temperaments and our own. Eventual creation of short videos will be easily accessible for busy parents and provide some examples of how things typically play out with temperaments and inspiration of the Bear way, which is curious, intuitive, firm and loving.

‘We hope that BBP can help reduce parental stress and frustration so there is time to connect in joy and curiosity with our children and foster their independence.’

For more information, you can contact Lori at this email address: <BearBonesParenting@gmail.com>

Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh is volunteer Director of The Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability (PIBS) and the Palestine Museum of Natural History (PMNH) but he is also actively engaged in the Palestinian struggle for liberation from Israeli occupation. As he evocatively noted in a recent Easter reflection: ‘This is the tenth Easter I celebrate after returning to Palestine in 2008. When we native Christian Palestinians have a few moments to meditate and reflect in this season, we reflect that some 2.5 billion human beings believe in a message that originated with a Palestinian baby born in a manger here and was crucified for being the first revolutionary Palestinian to push for caring for the sick and the poor.

‘We reflect on the real message of Jesus, a message of love and coexistence. The harsh reality on the ground reminds us of our responsibility to shape a better future.

‘We are hopeful because we take a long view of history. Some 150,000 years ago, humans migrated from Africa using Palestine as the passage way to Western Asia and then the rest of the world. 12,000 years ago, this area became the center of development for agriculture (the Fertile Crescent). This was where we humans first domesticated animals like goats and donkeys and plants like wheat, barley, chickpeas, and lentils. This transformation allowed our ancestors time to evolve what we now call “civilization”. Hence, the first writings, the first music, and art, and the first thoughts of deities. From our Aramaic alphabet came the Latin, Arabic, Syriac, and Hebrew alphabets. Aramaic was the language of Jesus and much of our current Palestinian Arabic is still Aramaic words.’

Mazin continues to travel regularly, lecturing about initiatives of the museum but also about the political reality in Palestine. If you would like to volunteer to assist the museum’s projects, or to donate money, books, natural history items or anything else that would be useful, you are welcome to contact Mazin and his colleagues at <info@palestinenature.org>

Finally, we are deeply saddened to report the passing of Tom Shea, a long-time stalwart in the struggle for a better world and one of the original team of individuals who launched ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’ on 11 November 2011. We include below the testament of his great friend and fellow nonviolent activist, Leonard Eiger:

‘For Tom Shea, Peace WAS the Way

‘My dear friend and fellow Ground Zero member Tom Shea passed away peacefully in the early morning hours of April 3rd surrounded by his family.

‘Earlier in his life Tom had been a Jesuit, a high school teacher, and had started an alternative high school and Jesuit Volunteer Corp: Midwest. He had also been involved in social justice issues on the national level with the Jesuits. Ground Zero member Bernie Meyer remembers Tom with great fondness, from being a student at St. Ignatius High School in Cleveland where Tom was teaching, to resisting together at Ground Zero many years later.

‘Tom was 47 when he left Cleveland for Traverse City, Michigan in 1977. There he met his partner Darylene, and they were inseparable from then on. Together, they participated in the Nuclear Freeze movement, and were part of the Michigan Peace Team. They traveled to New York for the second Conference on Disarmament in 1982. They protested both the first Gulf War and the war in Iraq. They also engaged in war tax resistance.

‘At Darylene’s suggestion, they attended a course in conflict mediation in the early ‘80s at a time when there was little written on the subject. That experience led them to a course taught by Quakers at Swarthmore College in 1986. In 1990 Tom and Darylene founded the five-county Conflict Resolution Service in Northern Michigan and trained the first group of volunteer mediators. Their mission was to promote peace and civility in the community through the use of mediator guided dialogue. In the early days of the program, volunteers met in church basements and around kitchen tables to train, role play and share experiences. They would travel to the homes of people needing mediation, focusing on resolving family and neighborhood conflicts.

‘Tom and Darylene moved to Snoqualmie, Washington in 2007 to spend more time with Darylene’s children. Tom got involved in community issues and continued his war tax resistance work. You could find him every April 15th, in front of the local post office, offering tax resistance information.

‘I was still leading a social justice ministry at the Snoqualmie United Methodist Church when one day Tom called the church office and asked who was doing social justice work in the area. We connected immediately due to common work and friends. Soon, Tom and I were making the pilgrimage together across the water to Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, and the rest (as they say) is history.

‘I have spent countless hours with Tom and Darylene, discussing world affairs and working together on strategies and tactics for our work with Ground Zero. Tom and Darylene have been inseparable as both life partners and co-conspirators for peace. Tom once said that Darylene is like a Jesuit herself: “Jesuits are taken as very scholarly people and she’s very scholarly.”

‘In addition to working on media and communications for Ground Zero, and planning vigils and nonviolent direct actions at the Bangor Trident nuclear submarine base, Tom put himself on the line many times, often entering the roadway blocking traffic, both on the County and Federal sides, symbolically closing the base and risking arrest. Tom also created street theatre scripts that have been used during vigils at the submarine base to entertain and educate people.

‘Robert Burrowes, who cofounded ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’, said that “Tom was one of the true legends in my life. A long-standing symbol of, and nonviolent fighter for, everything that could be in our world.” When all is said and done, Tom’s life can be summed up by A.J Muste: “There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.”

‘We will be scattering some of Tom’s ashes (per his wishes) at Ground Zero Center during our August Hiroshima-Nagasaki weekend of remembrance and action.

‘I invite you to honor Tom’s memory by supporting the work of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee. There are many ways we can engage in war tax resistance in the context of a broad range of nonviolent strategies for social change.’

While diminished by the passing of Tom, the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action continues ‘to explore the meaning and practice of nonviolence from a perspective of deep spiritual reflection, providing a means for witnessing to and resisting all nuclear weapons, especially Trident. We seek to go to the root of violence and injustice in our world and experience the transforming power of love through nonviolent direct action.’ You can read about their ongoing efforts on their website, Ground Zero, which also features a ‘Current Action Alert: Stop the “Low-Yield” Trident Warhead!’

Each of the individuals mentioned above is part of the ongoing and steadily expanding effort to end the violence in our world. They refuse to accept that violence cannot be ended, and each has chosen to focus on working to end one or more manifestations of violence, according to their particular interests. If you would like to join these people, you are welcome to sign the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

If your own interest is campaigning on a peace, climate, environment or social justice issue, consider doing it strategically. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy.

If your focus is a defense or liberation struggle being undertaken by a national group, consider enhancing its strategic impact. See Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.

If your preference is addressing the climate and environmental catastrophes systematically, consider participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’.

If you would like to tackle violence at its source, consider revising your parenting in accordance with ‘My Promise to Children’. If you want the evidence to understand why this is so crucial, see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

If you are aware enough to know that you are not dealing effectively with our deepening crisis, consider doing the personal healing necessary to do so. See ‘Putting Feelings First’.

It may be that ending human violence is impossible, as many believe. But there are a great number of people around the world who do not accept this and who are struggling, relentlessly, to end violence before it ends us. What about you?

 

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

 

Freedom Rider: The “Resistance” Is Silent on Julian Assange

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By Margaret Kimberly

Source: Black Agenda Report

Liberals are just as much true believers in imperialism as the right wing they claim to oppose.

“Attacking the person who revealed war crimes is compliance in the service of the state.”

Ever since Donald Trump was elected president we have heard a lot about people who call themselves the “resistance.” That word has very significant meaning and should not be used frivolously. The enslaved Haitian people resisted the French 200 years ago. Harriet Tubman resisted and so did Tecumseh. Brave people all over the world have resisted colonial invasion, occupation, and racist violence.

But resistance for the anti-Trump group doesn’t amount to very much. They are united in dislike of Donald Trump, but only some of the time. They call him a fascist, but they mute themselves when his fascism supports the bipartisan imperialist consensus.

The so-called resistance have been conspicuously silent ever since Julian Assange was arrested after Ecuador withdrew his asylum from its London embassy. Under the guise of defending the press, this same group became hysterical when Trump had a stupid argument with a CNN reporter.They are enraged when he refers to the media as “enemies of the people.” But when publisher and journalist Julian Assange was snatched up by the U.S. and its vassal states they either said nothing or condemned a man whose actions are the very embodiment of resistance.

“This same group became hysterical when Trump had a stupid argument with a CNN reporter.”

Julian Assange now sits in a London prison awaiting extradition hearings. The United States government convened a grand jury in 2017 which handed down a secret indictment against him. He is charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusionin relation to Chelsea Manning’s 2010 revelation of United States war crimes in Iraq. The Collateral Murder video shows army soldiers killing civilians, returning for a “double tap” killing of first responders, and laughing about their massacre. Anyone who revealed these horrors is a hero and should be supported without any ifs, ands or buts.

The United Kingdom played its usual role of partner in crime for the U.S. Fellow puppet state Australia refused to protect its citizen. Ecuador made off with a cool $4 billion in IMF loans. There is so much corruption to oppose but one wouldn’t know that with all the cheering on behalf of the surveillance state.

“Anyone who revealed these horrors is a hero.”

This resistance is little more than a collective hissy fit from dead ender Democrats who insist on following a party that can’t even reliably stay in office.  They have spent the last three years railing against Trump but bite their tongues when he commits an act that reeks of fascist ideology.

The kindest thing that can be said is that they have been hypnotized by a combination of Democratic Party and corporate media lies. It is very difficult to determine the truth in a culture saturated with all the deformities of an imperial state in panic mode. One has to act as a detective and know which web sites to read or whom to follow on social media in order to learn anything outside of the confines of state propaganda. Ever since election night in November 2016 the public have been subjected to a relentless campaign meant to deflect righteous anger away from the Democrats while furthering imperialist goals at the same time.

Julian Assange has become the poster child for the big lie. His leaks of Democratic National Committee emails are blamed for Hillary Clinton’s defeat. But there was no computer hack of the DNC at all. Assange received leaked materials from an insider and used Wikileaks to publish it.

“His leaks of Democratic National Committee emails are blamed for Hillary Clinton’s defeat.”

But that is only a partial explanation. The reality is far worse. Liberals are just as much true believers in imperialism as the right wing they claim to oppose.They are nothing if not consistent. When the Trump administration announced the coup attempt against the Venezuelan government the resistance didn’t resist at all.

Instead they repeated talking points from the New York Timesand National Public Radio which labeled the elected Venezuelan president a brutal dictator. They didn’t question the United States claim of a right to undo the will of people in another country. Some gave wishy washy criticism of military intervention but none of them questioned an intervention which is fascist by any definition.

“Liberals are just as much true believers in imperialism as the right wing they claim to oppose.”

These people will never defend Julian Assange. According to their world view he doesn’t deserve to be defended. He revealed government secrets, which runs counter to their support of the imperialist state, and they think he deprived them of a second Clinton presidency.

Now we know who is for real and who is a phony. Chelsea Manning sits in jail for a second time because she refused to testify before the grand jury which indicted Assange. There are people all over the world occupying Venezuelan embassies and consulates in order to protect them from the would be usurpers. That is resistance. Attacking the person who revealed war crimes is compliance in the service of the state. Perhaps this group needs a new name. They should be honest and call themselves the conformists. That would be truth in advertising.

 

Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com . Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.     

Ecuador Has Been Hit by 40 Million Cyber Attacks Since Assange’s Arrest

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By Elias Marat

Source: The Mind Unleashed

The government of Ecuador claims that the country has come under a broad and concerted cyber attack, with approximately 40 million attempts to compromise web portals connected to public institutions ever since the controversial decision to allow UK police to forcibly remove Wikileaks founder Julian Assange from their London Embassy.

Deputy Minister of Information and Communication Technologies Patricio Real told reporters that the wave of attacks began shortly after last Thursday’s arrest of Assange by British authorities. Real said that the attacks “principally come from the United States, Brazil, Holland, Germany, Romania, France, Austria and the United Kingdom, and also from here, from our territory.”

On April 11, Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno revoked the diplomatic asylum extended to Asange by the South American nation in 2012. In a legally dubious move, Quito also revoked the Ecuadorian nationality granted to Assange in 2017.

Ecuador’s El Comercio reported that the telecommunications ministry’s undersecretary of electronic government, Javier Jara, claimed that following “threats received by these groups related to Julian Assange”–such as the shadowy network Anonymous–the country began suffering “volumetric attacks.”

Volumetric attacks are a type of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in which servers are flooded with requests in an attempt to overload them with traffic, thus preventing users from accessing the network.

According to AFP, the targets included the foreign ministry, central bank, tax authorities, the office of the president, and a number of other government agencies’ websites. None of the attacks succeeded in destroying or stealing data.

The attacks also come amid the Ecuadorian government’s detention of Ola Bini, a Swedish national and software developer allegedly tied to Wikileaks who was detained last Thursday as he attempted to attend a martial arts event in Japan. Bini, as well as two unidentified Russian “hackers,” are being held for their alleged role in a “hackers’ network” based in the country. Bini, who is accused of having met with Assange 12 times, has also just been accused of playing a role in blackmail attempts targeting President Moreno.

Since 2017, Assange’s relationship with his Ecuadorean hosts sharply deteriorated amid President Lenin Moreno’s attempts to curry favor with international creditors and wealthy governments in the north such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Spain. Moreno began referring to Assange on various occasions as a “miserable hacker,” an “irritant,” and a “stone in the shoe” of his government.

Last year, the London embassy cut off his access to the internet for alleged political meddling following requests by Quito that he stop commenting on affairs in other countries.

Relations took a strong turn for the worse in March following the release of a batch of documents known as the “INA Papers,” which implicated the president in alleged corruption, including money-laundering, offshore bank accounts and a shell company named INA Investment Corporation that is based in Panama and was used by President Moreno’s family to procure furniture, property, and luxury goods.

It is widely speculated that while Wikileaks has still not been directly tied to the release of the INA Papers, President Moreno was enraged after personal photographs were released showing his opulent private life, including photos of the president enjoying lavish lobster breakfast-in-bed and lobster dinners–imagery considered damning by Ecuador’s electorate especially given Moreno’s prior boasting of a poverty diet of eggs and white rice, which he claimed to regularly eat as he rammed through austerity measures that led to thousands of layoffs in the poor yet resource-rich South American country.

Within Ecuador, opinions have been evenly split about Assange, with the country’s right-wing and centrists supporting the decision to end his asylum while the left and supporters of former President Rafael Correa have considered the move a scandalous act of outright prostration before the “imperialists” of the Global North.

As such, social media reactions to the government’s complaints of “cyber attacks” have provoked both outrage and mockery from the Ecuadorian public, with some social media users thanking Assange for releasing the INA Papers and others claiming that the attacks will serve as a convenient smokescreen for the country’s authorities to further plunder the public coffers of the South American country.

A Land Uncharted: the Persecution of Julian Assange

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Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

By Kenn Orphan

Source: CounterPunch

“The freedom of the press is not safe. It’s over. And I think our republic is in its last days, because unauthorized disclosures of this kind are the lifeblood of a republic.”

– Daniel Ellsberg

The persecution and arrest of Julian Assange is the first and most definitive step toward full blown global fascism. The symbolism of a gravely ill journalist being manhandled by uniformed henchmen is the exact imagery it needed to send a chilling message to whistleblowers and the press. The assault and eventual dismantling of what remains of a free press has always been that first step, and it is what lies on the horizon barring mass dissent. For decades the mainstream media has acquiesced to the demands of the corporate world of high finance that now owns them outright and the military and surveillance state that informs their narrative. To be sure, many of them must be trembling at the events that unfolded in London.

That so many prominent American liberals are cheering this on is hardly surprising. History is replete with examples of how the privileged bourgeoisie are the first to capitulate to fascism. It happened in the 1930’s in Germany, Spain and Italy. It happened in the 1970’s in Argentina and Chile. It is happening now across the supposedly “democratic” western world. The animus they possess for Assange is not over his personal ethics, politics or affiliations, which are indeed open for criticism and debate. Like any human being, he is flawed. It is rooted in sore feelings over Wikileaks exposure of the machinations of the corrupt Democratic Party and their Wall Street favoured war hawk, Hillary Clinton. None of what Wikileaks revealed was untrue, but they blame the failure of their deeply flawed candidate on it nonetheless. They care little about the war crimes the platform helped expose through the courage of Chelsea Manning or the threat his persecution represents to press freedom itself.

That the fascist despot Trump has disavowed Wikileaks is hardly surprising either. After all, he may have used the leaks to his benefit, but the man who has relentlessly demonized the press will undoubtedly use this moment to his benefit again. Wikileaks as an organization isn’t perfect and, like any other media outlet, it is not beyond criticism. But nearly every major news outlet has used and published its material, without appreciation or gratitude, because it provided an unprecedented glimpse into the nefarious activities and guiding principles of the ruling elite. The veil had been finally lifted. But with the arrest of Julian Assange this makes all of those news outlets vulnerable to state or corporate repression and censure.

With the Trump administration chomping at the bit to launch a war against Iran and Venezuela, this must come as welcome news to them. After all, it was Wikileaks that exposed the war crimes of the Bush administration in Iraq, not the corporate media. So they can be assured little reporting, aside from a few courageous citizen journalists or those embedded with the troops who parrot Pentagon talking points, will be done to expose the Empire’s war crimes now.

Indeed, Trump has been given a green light with this one event to continue and expand the American Empire, moribund as it is, without reproach. And like a bloated corpse, it will undoubtedly infect and defile everything it touches. More brutal violations of the global south, more coups against democratically elected governments, and bolder acts of authoritarian cruelty at home. He has made no pretense of this. His minions, Pompeo and Bolton, are working tirelessly constructing the next war. And in the past several weeks he has purged his administration of monsters he deemed “too weak” when it comes to crackdowns against immigrants and asylum seekers. A classic tactic of all tyrants. He has anointed the rabid white supremacist, Stephen Miller, in this 21st century pogrom and has also toyed with the idea of making the military in charge of internment camps for migrants. Only a fool would not find such a thing chilling to the bone.

Indeed fascist leaders around the world, along with the military/surveillance establishment and their neoliberal enablers, are celebrating the silencing of Assange. After all, Wikileaks has represented a major thorn in their sides for a decade. From Netanyahu to Duterte to Bolsonaro to Modi and even Putin, all will be emboldened to expand their own attacks on press freedom. All of them will feel empowered to be even more unrestrained in their brutality.

We are on the eve of a sweeping, global, fascist tyranny. Thanks to the continued proliferation of nuclear arms, endless corporate and military assaults on the life sustaining biosphere, catastrophic climate change and the systematic dismantling of democracy, it is a land uncharted. Journalists, especially those who are independent of the corporate stranglehold, are being routinely and relentlessly persecuted and even murdered around the world. They are a bulwark against fascism we dare not lose. But the arrest of Assange is representative of a free press now under constant threat of annihilation. And it will without a doubt grow even more difficult for them to navigate through the mendacity of a ruthless ruling order that has become utterly unrestrained.

Kenn Orphan is an artist, sociologist, radical nature lover and weary, but committed activist. He can be reached at kennorphan.com.