SIRATYST (Stuff I Read and Thought You Should Too) -- “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.” (Calgacus, as quoted by Tacitus, Agricola 30-31)"
Wednesday, March 31, 2021
Tuesday, March 30, 2021
Monday, March 29, 2021
Sunday, March 28, 2021
Belarus' MFA Supports Aspirations of American People
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*Emphasis mine.
MINSK, 26 March (BelTA) - The Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Ministry supports the aspirations of the American people for a better future, reads the commentary of the press service of the Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs released in response to the U.S. Embassy's statement of 25 March 2020, BelTA has learned.
“In connection with the statement of the U.S. Embassy of 25 March 2021, we express our sincere appreciation to the United States for finally showing readiness to shift the bilateral rhetoric onto a constructive track and for congratulating our country on the significant date in our history. We would welcome the extension of this practice to public holidays,” the commentary reads. *“We acknowledge our mistake and take the opportunity to apologize for failing to congratulate the United States on the recent 160th anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution of the Confederate States of America, whose flag is still dear to many Americans. On the other hand, the BLM movement has tens of millions of activists across the country."
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs noted with regret that today the American society is deeply divided and quoted the current U.S. President Joseph Biden: “My whole soul is in bringing America together, uniting our people, and uniting our nation... I know the forces that divide us are deep and they are real… Let us start afresh. Let us listen to one another. Hear one another. See one another.”
“We support the aspirations of the American people for a better future – on this day and every day! Therefore, we believe that only a genuine inclusive dialogue will help the American nation to unite at this difficult moment in history. As a selfless gesture of goodwill, Belarus, having experience of hosting the negotiations of the TCG [Trilateral Contract Group for the peaceful settlement of the situation in eastern Ukraine] is ready to offer its services in organizing such a process,” the press service noted.
The ministry noted that although more than two centuries have passed since the United States declared its independence, the recent events in the country show that the struggle of the American people for freedom still continues. “Hundreds of thousands of Americans of all ages are publicly demanding the right to define their country's future. In attempting to have their voices heard many of them pay a heavy price as the regime resorted to lethal force and gunned down several people to maintain its grip on power and lock in results of the election,” the statement reads.
“We admire the courage and determination of American heroes, including Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning, who sacrificed almost everything for the sake of true freedom and harmony in the American society. Belarus supports the American people and looks forward to the day when every common American will be able to walk by the Capitol freely,” the press service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.
The Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is also grateful to the new U.S. Ambassador to Belarus Julie Fischer for "an invaluable help in telling the entire Belarusian people when and how to hold elections.” “Due to their primitive and poor thinking the Belarusians would never be able to solve this issue on their own. As a token of incredible appreciation, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is ready to fast-track Her Excellency's application for Belarusian citizenship in order to include her in the electoral roll and give her the right to vote. This can also be done without Belarusian citizenship using some digital platform recognized by Julie Fisher,” the ministry quipped.
“We cannot ignore the USA's assistance with organizing the election. Such achievements of the American electoral system as voting by mail and the Electoral College instead of direct voting can be useful and should be explored by Belarus,” the press service noted. “We are deeply touched by the attention of the United States to Belarus' life. In response we can make a selfless contribution to the development of Alaska's agriculture and effective development of its lands. We are ready to look into the possibility of shared control over Alaska. We could also send Belarusian construction crews based in the region to share experience and help residents of the southern states deal with the aftermath of the natural disaster,” the press service pointed out.
"We sincerely wish the entire American people unity and smooth ascension up the ladder of the American dream. We hope that the positive trend in our relations will continue and we will live to see the moment when we can welcome the U.S. Sixth Fleet near the sea shores of Belarus!” the press service concluded.
From BelTA's editorial office: “It is obvious that the commentary of the Ministry of Foreign Ministry's press service should be taken with humor, as ironic trolling of the United States. The commentary uses some phrases from the statement of the U.S. Embassy in Minsk in connection with the 103rd anniversary of the declaration of the Belarusian People's Republic of 1918. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs press service has mirrored these statements to reflect upon the current realities in the United States, the existing division of the society and related issues. Belarus has always advocated the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries, which a number of foreign countries do not mind doing.
Saturday, March 27, 2021
Friday, March 26, 2021
Thursday, March 25, 2021
NATO Headquarters: Blinken announces last global crusade – Anti-bellum
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NATO Headquarters: Blinken announces last global crusade – Anti-bellum
Nice country ya got there. Wouldn't want to see anything happen to it. -- NATO
What You Call Love Is Unpaid Work: The Twelfth Newsletter (2021)
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https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/11-care-work/
Excerpt:
Women and girls, the ILO study shows, carry out three quarters of the unpaid care work that is required to maintain families and society. If those who perform unpaid care work received the minimum wage in their respective countries, the wage bill would amount to US$11 trillion (or up to roughly 15% of global Gross Domestic Product, the size of the total digital economy). The necessity of this unpaid care work – including taking care of children and the elderly – has prevented women, and some men, from entering the paid workforce. In 2018, according to the ILO, 606 million women said that unpaid care work meant that they could not seek paid employment outside the home; 41 million men said the same thing.
Wednesday, March 24, 2021
Monday, March 22, 2021
Saturday, March 20, 2021
How President of Russia Responded to President of USA's Comments
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http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/65172
International Music Festival volunteer coordinator and representative of Crimea Federal University Polina Bolbochan: Mr President, I have a somewhat personal question for you. Yesterday, President Biden got quite tough in his interview, including with regard to you. What would you say to him?
Vladimir Putin: With regard to my US colleague’s remark, we have, indeed, as he said, met in person. What would I tell him? I would say “stay healthy.” I wish him good health. I am saying this without irony or tongue in cheek. This is my first point.
Secondly, taking a broader approach to this matter, I would like to say that difficult, dramatic, and bloody events abound in the history of every nation and every state. But when we evaluate other people, or even other states and nations, we are always facing a mirror, we always see ourselves in the reflection, because we project our inner selves onto the other person.
You know, I remember when we were children and played in the yard, we had arguments occasionally and we used to say: whatever you call me is what you are called yourself. This is no coincidence or just a kids’ saying or joke. It has a very deep psychological undercurrent. We always see ourselves in another person and think that he or she is just like us, and evaluate the other person’s actions based on our own outlook on life.
With regard to the US establishment, the ruling class – not the American people who are mostly honest, decent and sincere people who want to live in peace and friendship with us, something we are aware of and appreciate, and we will rely on them in the future – their mindset was formed in rather challenging circumstances which we are all aware of. After all, the colonisation of the American continent by the Europeans went hand-in-hand with the extermination of the local people, the genocide, as they say today, outright genocide of the Indian tribes followed by a very tough, long and difficult period of slavery, a very cruel period. All of that has been part of life in America throughout the history of the United States to this day. Otherwise, where would the Black Lives Matter movement come from? To this day, African Americans face injustice and even extermination.
The ruling class of the United States tends to address domestic and foreign policy issues based on these assumptions. After all, the United States is the only country to have used nuclear weapons, mind you, against a non-nuclear state – Japan, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of WW II. There was absolutely no military need for the bombing. It was nothing but the extermination of civilians. I am bringing this up, because I know that the United States and its leaders are determined to maintain certain relations with us, but on matters that are of interest to the United States and on its terms. Even though they believe we are just like them, we are different. We have a different genetic, cultural and moral code. But we know how to uphold our interests. We will work with the United States, but in the areas that we are interested in and on terms that we believe are beneficial to us. They will have to reckon with it despite their attempts to stop our development, despite the sanctions and insults. They will have to reckon with this.
We, with our national interests in mind, will promote our relations with all countries, including the United States. This is generally all I want to say about this.
Friday, March 19, 2021
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama | by Nathan Thrall | The New York Review of Books
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https://www.nybooks.com/daily/
Recommended as a "must read" by Huwaida Arraf. I agree, humbly. (pretty long)
EXCERPTS:
Searching for a universal, non-Biblical justification for Israel’s existence, secular Zionists asserted that persecuted Jews had deserved a safe haven. But this argument contained a number of flaws. A need for refuge is not a license to dispossess. Zionists did not come to Palestine seeking to integrate into local society, but to establish their own exclusive state at the natives’ expense. The need for safe haven was not the original motivation for establishing a Jewish national home. As Michael Stanislawski, the Nathan J. Miller Professor of Jewish History at Columbia University, writes:
The all-too-frequent claim that modern Jewish nationalism was born in response to anti-Semitism or to the outbreak of violent attacks (“pogroms”) against the Jews which began in the Russian Empire in 1881–[18]82 is quite simply wrong: the first expressions of this new ideology were published well before the spread of the new anti-Semitic ideology and before the pogroms of the early 1880s. …the fundamental cause of the emergence of modern Jewish nationalism was the rise, on the part of Jews themselves, of new ideologies that applied the basic tenets of modern nationalism to the Jews, and not a response to persecution.
The original aim of modern Jewish nationalism was to prevent the assimilation of Jews into the nations in which they lived—the rescue of Jewish identity, not of Jews. When, in the period 1903–1905, the Zionist movement was presented with a choice between an actual, immediate refuge—offered by the British, in East Africa—and the pursuit of an uncertain dream in Zion, it was the argument for the latter that won. The pogroms that followed the rise of modern Jewish nationalism increased the attractiveness of Zionism for some Jews, but many more responded by immigrating to the United States. Even well after those pogroms began in 1881–1882, and until the end of the Holocaust, Zionism remained a minority movement, rejected by most rabbinic and lay leaders. Today, when Israeli flags are at the front of many American synagogues, it is easy to forget that during its first half-century, Zionism was a sect within a dissident sect: most Jews were not Jewish nationalists, and even many Jewish nationalists were not Zionists but members of the secular, socialist Bund, which called for Jewish autonomy in the places in which Jews resided, not in Palestine. Almost all the Jews who did seek to escape persecution chose to go elsewhere. From the start of Zionist settlement in 1882 to the outbreak of World War I, some 2.5 million Jews left Eastern Europe, mostly to America. Only 60,000 went to Palestine, of whom about 8,000 were committed Zionists—comprising less than 0.5 percent of the Eastern European Jewish emigration. More than half of these immigrants left Palestine.
***The Israeli “peace camp,” contrary to what the country’s political right and the settlers claim, has no desire to turn Israel into a liberal, universalist state with equality for all its citizens. It seeks, in fact, to preserve Israel as a Jewish ethnocratic state. The peace that it proposes is less one of reconciliation than of separation. In the words of Yitzhak Rabin, “It is better for the Arabs not to be swarming around here.” Religious and right-wing Zionists see enormous hypocrisy in the left’s presentation of itself as a noble seeker of peace, with the settlers cast as villains. In the Yesha Council’s monthly magazine, Nekuda, Vered Noam, a Tel Aviv University professor of Talmud and winner of the Israel Prize, the country’s highest honor, described the Zionist left’s support for enclosing Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza behind fences and walls in this way:
The left views a barrier as a didactic means, an accelerator of the Jewish recognition of the need to separate between the populations, an exercise in Palestinian statehood.… However, the central motivation is not the concern for the civil rights of the Palestinians. The continued suffocation and starvation of two million people [in Gaza] does not sit well with such a concern.…the true stimulus of the left is separation from the Arabs. The closure [of Palestinian areas] exposes a surprising similarity between the majority of leftists and the extreme right which upholds the idea of transfer [of Palestinians to other countries]. The central aspiration of both is to dispose of Arab presence.
Every Israeli settlement plan—from the Allon to the Sharon, Drobles, and Super Zones plans—discarded most of the densely populated Palestinian cities in Gaza and the West Bank, leaving them to the Palestinians for self-rule. Israel wanted to take over Palestinian land only when it didn’t require absorbing too many of its non-Jewish inhabitants. This Israeli aversion to integrating urban Palestinian areas—where Israel has instead implemented its policy of hafrada, or segregation—is the foundation of worldwide belief in the possibility of a two-state solution. Prime Minister Netanyahu has repeatedly stated that “we don’t want to govern them,” and from this true statement a number of wild leaps have been made, most notably that autonomy in a handful of disconnected Palestinian cities can be stretched, bent, and twisted into a Palestinian state.
The Zionist left’s primary objection to annexation is that it would harm the goal of having as few Palestinians as possible within the borders of the Jewish state. One of the groups illustrating this was The People Against Annexation, formed in 2020. It was handsomely funded by a board member of the bipartisan pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, Stacy Schusterman, whose family foundation supports numerous Israel advocacy groups (in the 2020 election campaign, Schusterman donated $550,000 to defeat the Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and more than $1.2 million to a pro-Israel group that ran ads against Senator Bernie Sanders). The People Against Annexation was headed by the former Israel director of J Street, the Democratic Party-aligned pro-Israel lobbying group in Washington, D.C. Among the ads produced by the organization was a poster demonizing Palestinians as Islamist terrorists by implying that annexation would mean renaming a Tel Aviv street after Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the founder of the Islamic Resistance Movement, also known as Hamas.
***
In Israel’s liberal, anti-settlement circles, it is often asserted that the Occupation is a terrible blight, an aberration from the democratic values of the first nineteen years of the state. In fact, those years provided the template for the segregation, land confiscation, ethnic domination, and separate legal regimes for Jews and Palestinians that characterize the present-day West Bank. In more than seventy-two years of statehood, there have been only six months when Israel did not place most of the native population under military rule while it confiscated their land and deprived those people of basic civil rights.
Since 1967, Israel’s policy has been to have its occupied subjects pay for their own occupation, primarily through Israeli-collected taxes (though also through Israel’s extraction of natural resources). The army’s blueprint “Operational Principles for the Administered Territories,” published in the war’s aftermath, states that “the economy of the administered territories should weigh on the Israeli budget as little as possible.” Today, much of Israel’s occupation is underwritten by the United States—not only through the $3.8 billion the US gives Israel every year, but also through infrastructure projects in the West Bank that are paid for from a separate USAID budget. Ostensibly, this is for Palestinian development; in practice, it means that US taxpayers are subsidizing the infrastructure of ethnic segregation in areas that Israel is steadily colonizing. In 2013, the year that USAID upgraded the Jaba road in Area C, the organization spent $440 million in the occupied territories, $50 million of it on infrastructure. The US provided an additional $3.4 billion to the Israeli military that year.
Wednesday, March 17, 2021
Tuesday, March 16, 2021
Monday, March 15, 2021
Sunday, March 14, 2021
Saturday, March 13, 2021
Thursday, March 11, 2021
Tuesday, March 09, 2021
US, Allies Drop 46 Bombs Per Day for 20 Years in Middle East and Africa
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US, Allies Drop 46 Bombs Per Day for 20 Years in Middle East and Africa
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Residents carry the body of several civilians killed in a US airstrike in
Mosul, Iraq on March 24, 2017. Felipe Dana | APA nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. -- Martin Luther King Jr.And this was said in 1967. I think we have overshot the spiritual death runway.
Monday, March 08, 2021
Julian Assange - Google Is Not What It Seems [Old but explains why Empire is Loath to #FreeJulianAssange]
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Julian Assange - Google Is Not What It Seems:
"Writing in 2013, Schmidt and Cohen stated, 'What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first.'"
"Writing in 2013, Schmidt and Cohen stated, 'What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first.'"
Sunday, March 07, 2021
Saturday, March 06, 2021
Friday, March 05, 2021
Thursday, March 04, 2021
Wednesday, March 03, 2021
Monday, March 01, 2021
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