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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)"
Monday, May 30, 2016
Happy Memorial Day! from Mr. Fish
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Sunday, May 15, 2016
Seattle Commemorates 68 Years of Palestine's Nakba. #FreePalestine!
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| Seattle commemorates Palestine's Nakba when Israel Occupied Palestine in 1948 |
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| How the Nakba happened. |
Wednesday, May 11, 2016
On the Nakba Anniversary, IOA Imposes Hermetic Closure on the West Bank, Gaza Strip"
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http://english.palinfo.com/site/pages/details.aspx?itemid=78536
RAMALLAH, (PIC)-- The Israeli occupation authorities (IOA) imposed a hermetic closure on the West Bank and Gaza Strip on the occasion of Israel’s celebration of its establishment in what the Palestinians call Nakba (catastrophe). The closure, from Tuesday night till dawn Friday, coincides with Israel’s 68th establishment anniversary on the land of Palestine and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the process. The Israeli TV 2 Channel said that all West Bank crossings will be closed in that period along with the Karm Abu Salem and Erez crossings with Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, Palestinians in 1948 occupied Palestine, Jerusalem, West Bank, Gaza Strip, and the diaspora commemorate the same occasion on May 15 under the name of Nakba to assert their right to their homeland and the right of refugees to return to their villages and cities from which they were driven out by force.
Read more at: http://english.palinfo.com/site/pages/details.aspx?itemid=78536
Copyright © The Palestinian Information Center
RAMALLAH, (PIC)-- The Israeli occupation authorities (IOA) imposed a hermetic closure on the West Bank and Gaza Strip on the occasion of Israel’s celebration of its establishment in what the Palestinians call Nakba (catastrophe). The closure, from Tuesday night till dawn Friday, coincides with Israel’s 68th establishment anniversary on the land of Palestine and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the process. The Israeli TV 2 Channel said that all West Bank crossings will be closed in that period along with the Karm Abu Salem and Erez crossings with Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, Palestinians in 1948 occupied Palestine, Jerusalem, West Bank, Gaza Strip, and the diaspora commemorate the same occasion on May 15 under the name of Nakba to assert their right to their homeland and the right of refugees to return to their villages and cities from which they were driven out by force.
Read more at: http://english.palinfo.com/site/pages/details.aspx?itemid=78536
Copyright © The Palestinian Information Center
"Michael Ratner, Unflinching Warrior for Humanity 1943-2016" -- Could Not Agree More with this Real News Network Headline
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https://youtu.be/FNK-vgaFQj4
THE ABOVE EPISODE OF REALITY ASSERTS ITSELF WITH PAUL JAY INTERVIEWING HIM IS AN EXAMPLE OF WHY WE ARE ALL REALLY GOING TO MISS MICHAEL RATNER. PRESENTÉ
https://youtu.be/FNK-vgaFQj4
THE ABOVE EPISODE OF REALITY ASSERTS ITSELF WITH PAUL JAY INTERVIEWING HIM IS AN EXAMPLE OF WHY WE ARE ALL REALLY GOING TO MISS MICHAEL RATNER. PRESENTÉ
Monday, May 09, 2016
"Zionism’s Roots Help us Interpret Israel Today" -- Jonathan Cook
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http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2016-05-09/zionisms-roots-help-us-interpret-israel-today/
- See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2016-05-09/zionisms-roots-help-us-interpret-israel-today/#sthash.J0Td7joR.dpuf
The National – 9 May 2016
It was an assessment no one expected from the deputy head of the Israeli military. In his Holocaust Day speech last week, Yair Golan compared current trends in Israel with Germany in the early 1930s. In today’s Israel, he said, could be recognised “the revolting processes that occurred in Europe … There is nothing easier than hating the stranger, nothing easier than to stir fears and intimidate.”
The furore over Gen Golan’s remarks followed a similar outcry in Britain at statements by former London mayor Ken Livingstone. He observed that Hitler had been “supporting Zionism” in 1933 when the Nazis signed a transfer agreement, allowing some German Jews to emigrate to Palestine.
In their different ways both comments refer back to a heated argument among Jews about whether Zionism was a blessing or a blight. Although largely overlooked today, the dispute throws much light on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Those differences came to a head in 1917 when the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, a document promising for the first time to realise the Zionist goal of a “national home” for the Jews in Palestine. Only one minister, Edwin Montagu, dissented. Notably, he was the only Jew in the British cabinet. The two facts were not unconnected. In a memo, he warned that his government’s policy would be a “rallying ground for anti-Semites in every country”.
He was far from alone in that view. Of the 4 million Jews who left Europe between 1880 and 1920, only 100,000 went to Palestine in line with Zionist expectations. As the Israeli novelist A B Yehoshua once noted: “If the Zionist party had run in an election in the early 20th century, it would have received only 6 or 7 per cent of the Jewish people’s vote.”
What Montagu feared was that the creation of a Jewish state in a far-flung territory dovetailed a little too neatly with the aspirations of Europe’s anti-Semites, then much in evidence, including in the British government.
According to the dominant assumptions of Europe’s ethnic nationalisms of the time, the region should be divided into peoples or biological “races”, and each should control a territory in which it could flourish. The Jews were viewed as a “problem” because – in addition to lingering Christian anti-Semitism – they were considered subversive of this national model.
Jews were seen as a race apart, one that could not – or should not – be allowed to assimilate. Better, on this view, to encourage their emigration from Europe. For British elites, the Balfour Declaration was a means to achieve that end.
Theodor Herzl, the father of political Zionism, understood this trenchant anti-Semitism very well. His idea for a Jewish state was inspired in part by the infamous Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish French army officer was framed by his commanders for treason. Herzl was convinced that anti-Semitism would always exclude Jews from true acceptance in Europe.
It is for this reason that Mr Livingstone’s comments – however clumsily expressed – point to an important truth. Herzl and other early Zionists implicitly accepted the ugly framework of European bigotry.
Jews, Herzl concluded, must embrace their otherness and regard themselves as a separate race. Once they found a benefactor to give them a territory – soon Britain would oblige with Palestine – they could emulate the other European peoples from afar.
For a while, some Nazi leaders were sympathetic. Adolf Eichmann, one of the later engineers of the Holocaust, visited Palestine in 1937 to promote the “Zionist emigration” of Jews.
Hannah Arendt, the German Jewish scholar of totalitarianism, argued even in 1944 – long after the Nazis abandoned ideas of emigration and embraced genocide instead – that the ideology underpinning Zionism was “nothing else than the uncritical acceptance of German-inspired nationalism”.
Israel and its supporters would prefer we forget that, before the rise of the Nazis, most Jews deeply opposed a future in which they were consigned to Palestine.
Those who try to remind us of this forgotten history are likely to be denounced, like Livingstone, as anti-Semites. They are accused of making a simplistic comparison between Zionism and Nazism.
But there is good reason to examine this uncomfortable period.
Modern Israeli politicians, including Benjamin Netanyahu, still regularly declare that Jews have only one home – in Israel. After every terror attack in Europe, they urge Jews to hurry to Israel, telling them they can never be safe where they are.
It also alerts us to the fact that even today the Zionist movement cannot help but mirror many of the flaws of those now-discredited European ethnic nationalisms, as Gen Golan appears to appreciate.
Such characteristics – all too apparent in Israel – include: an exclusionary definition of peoplehood; a need to foment fear and hatred of the other as a way to keep the nation tightly bound; an obsession with and hunger for territory; and a highly militarised culture.
Recognising Zionism’s ideological roots, inspired by racial theories of peoplehood that in part fuelled the Second World War, might allow us to understand modern Israel a little better. And why it seems incapable of extending a hand of peace to the Palestinians.
- See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2016-05-09/zionisms-roots-help-us-interpret-israel-today/#sthash.J0Td7joR.dpuf
Saturday, May 07, 2016
Wednesday, May 04, 2016
"Fort McMurray's 80,000 Climate Refugees" -- Paul Beckwith
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https://youtu.be/uT0rXeo1SCI
CORRECTION: Mr. Beckwith said the Great Barrier Reef was in California, but he misspoke. It is in Australia.
https://youtu.be/uT0rXeo1SCI
CORRECTION: Mr. Beckwith said the Great Barrier Reef was in California, but he misspoke. It is in Australia.
Sunday, May 01, 2016
Tuesday, April 26, 2016
"Seattle: Indigenous People Protest Tribal Disenrollment"
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Above Photo: Indigenous people from throughout Washington march through Seattle streets to protest tribal disenrollment. ALEX GARLAND
Original Article here: http://www.thestranger.com/slog/2016/04/18/23975195/people-are-marching-in-support-of-the-nooksack-306-in-westlake-park-today
via Popular Resistance
Original Article here: http://www.thestranger.com/slog/2016/04/18/23975195/people-are-marching-in-support-of-the-nooksack-306-in-westlake-park-today
via Popular Resistance
Monday, April 25, 2016
Sunday, April 24, 2016
Thursday, April 21, 2016
Monday, April 18, 2016
Friday, April 15, 2016
Monday, April 11, 2016
Wednesday, April 06, 2016
Sunday, April 03, 2016
Unist'ot'en Reportback and Fundraiser -- Seattle, April 9, Hillman City Collaboratory
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INFORMATION RE UNIST'OT'EN (First Nations Clan successfully stopping oil and gas pipelines in BC by blocking w/their bodies): http://forestaction.wikidot.com/unistoten
An evening of celebratory resistance with Rising Tide Seattle and Friends.
$5-20 suggested donation at the door // Food & drinks (non-alcoholic) provided
This event is an all-ages/family-friendly reportback and fundraiser for the Unist'ot'en Camp
We will be showing recent films about Unist'ot'en and Lelu Island, followed by Q&A with RTS collective members & friends who have spent time at the camp in the past year. Later in the evening we'll have space for community time and live music (bring your dancing shoes!)
BANDS: Dozer, Earth of Foxes, and Animals of Grace, music starting around 8:30
We would like to connect folks in the Seattle area with resources and information for travelling to the camp later in the year, particularly indigenous youth who would like to participate in the upcoming Summer Art Camp (It's going to be awesome!!).
We'd also like to talk about ways we in Seattle/ the Salish Sea region can act in solidarity with land defenders up north, so bring your ideas and your questions and your wonderful, beautiful selves!
See you then!
RTS
****Accessibility for the Co-lab: building is wheelchair accessible, and the event is held on the ground floor. Bathrooms may be small for large wheelchairs (less than standard 4' clearance). Will update with more info later.
Please don't wear strong scents so that everyone is comfortable attending
An evening of celebratory resistance with Rising Tide Seattle and Friends.
$5-20 suggested donation at the door // Food & drinks (non-alcoholic) provided
This event is an all-ages/family-friendly reportback and fundraiser for the Unist'ot'en Camp
We will be showing recent films about Unist'ot'en and Lelu Island, followed by Q&A with RTS collective members & friends who have spent time at the camp in the past year. Later in the evening we'll have space for community time and live music (bring your dancing shoes!)
BANDS: Dozer, Earth of Foxes, and Animals of Grace, music starting around 8:30
We would like to connect folks in the Seattle area with resources and information for travelling to the camp later in the year, particularly indigenous youth who would like to participate in the upcoming Summer Art Camp (It's going to be awesome!!).
We'd also like to talk about ways we in Seattle/ the Salish Sea region can act in solidarity with land defenders up north, so bring your ideas and your questions and your wonderful, beautiful selves!
See you then!
RTS
****Accessibility for the Co-lab: building is wheelchair accessible, and the event is held on the ground floor. Bathrooms may be small for large wheelchairs (less than standard 4' clearance). Will update with more info later.
Please don't wear strong scents so that everyone is comfortable attending
Pepe Escobar on RT: "Brazil, Like Russia, Under Attack by Hybrid War" -- [Initiated by Guess Who? Exceptionalistan]
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https://www.rt.com/op-edge/337411-brazil-russia-hybrid-attack/
https://www.rt.com/op-edge/337411-brazil-russia-hybrid-attack/
Color revolutions would never be enough; Exceptionalistan is always on the lookout for major strategic upgrades capable of ensuring perpetual Empire of Chaos hegemony.
The ideological matrix and the modus operandi of color revolutions by now are a matter of public domain. Not so much the concept of Unconventional War (UW).
UW was spelled out by the 2010 Special Forces Unconventional Warfare manual. Here’s the money quote:
“The intent of US [Unconventional Warfare] UW efforts is to exploit a hostile power’s political, military, economic, and psychological vulnerabilities by developing and sustaining resistance forces to accomplish US strategic objectives… For the foreseeable future, US forces will predominantly engage in irregular warfare (IW) operations.”
“Hostile” powers are meant not only in a military sense; any state that dares to defy any significant plank of the Washington-centric world “order” – from Sudan to Argentina – may be branded “hostile”.
The dangerous liaisons between color revolutions and UW have now fully blossomed as Hybrid War; a warped case of Flowers of Evil. A color revolution is nothing but the first stage of what will become Hybrid War. And Hybrid War can be interpreted essentially as the weaponization of chaos theory – an absolute conceptual darling of the US military (“politics is the continuation of war by linguistic means”). My 2014 book Empire of Chaos essentially tracks its myriad manifestations.
This very well-argued three-part thesis clarifies the central objective behind a major Hybrid War; “to disrupt multipolar transnational connective projects through externally provoked identity conflicts (ethnic, religious, political, etc.) within a targeted transit state.”
The BRICS – an extremely dirty word/concept in the Beltway/Wall Street axis – had to be the prime targets of Hybrid War. For myriad reasons. Among them; the push for trade and commerce in their own currencies, bypassing the US dollar; the creation of the BRICS development bank; the avowed drive towards Eurasia integration, symbolized by the now converging China-led New Silk Roads - or One Belt, One Road (OBOR), in its official terminology - and Russia-led Eurasia Economic Union (EEU).
This implies that Hybrid War sooner rather than later will hit Central Asia; Kyrgysztan, a prime lab for Exceptionalistan experiments of the color revolution kind, is the ideal candidate.
As it stands, Hybrid War is very much active in Russia’s western borderlands (Ukraine) but still embryonic in Xinjiang, China’s Far West, which Beijing micromanages like a hawk. Hybrid War is already being applied to prevent a crucial Pipelineistan gambit; the construction of Turkish Stream. And will also be fully applied to interrupt the Balkan Silk Road – essential for China’s integrated trade/commerce with Eastern Europe.
As the BRICS are the only, real counter power to Exceptionalistan, a strategy had to be developed for each of the major players. Everything was thrown at Russia – from sanctions to full demonization, from a raid on its currency to an oil price war, even including (pathetic) attempts to start a color revolution in the streets of Moscow. For a weaker BRICS node, a more subtle strategy would have to be developed. Which brings us to the complexity of Hybrid War as applied to the current, massive political/economic destabilization of Brazil.
In the UW manual, swaying the perceptions of a vast “uncommitted middle population” is essential in the road to success, so these uncommitted eventually turn against their political leaders. The process encompasses everything from “supporting insurgency” (as in Syria) to “wider discontent through propaganda and political and psychological efforts to discredit the government” (as in Brazil). And as an insurrection escalates, so should the “intensification of propaganda; psychological preparation of the population for rebellion.” That, in a nutshell, has been the Brazilian case.
We need our own Saddam
Exceptionalistan’s utmost strategic objective is usually to have a merger of color revolution and UW. But Brazil’s civil society and vibrant democracy were too sophisticated for hardcore UW steps such as sanctions or R2P (“responsibility to protect”).
It’s no wonder that Sao Paulo was turned into the epicenter of the Hybrid War against Brazil. Sao Paulo, the wealthiest Brazilian state, also housing the economic/financial capital of Latin America, is the key node in an interlinked national/international power structure.
The Wall Street-centered global financial system – which rules over virtually the whole West – simply could not allow national sovereignty in full expression in a major regional actor such as Brazil.
The Brazilian Spring, in the beginning, was virtually invisible, an exclusive social media phenomenon – just as Syria in early 2011.
Then, in June 2013, Edward Snowden leaked those notorious NSA spying practices. In Brazil, the NSA was all over Petrobras. And suddenly, out of the blue, a regional judge, Sergio Moro, based on a single source - a currency exchange operator in the black market – had access to a major Petrobras document dump. Up to now, the two-year Car Wash corruption investigation has not revealed how they got to know so much about what they dub the “criminal cell” acting inside Petrobras.
What matters is that the color revolution modus operandi – a fight against corruption and “in defense of democracy” - was already in place. That was the first step of Hybrid War.
As Exceptionalistan coined “good” and “bad” terrorists wreaking havoc across “Syraq”, in Brazil surged the figure of the “good” and the “bad” corrupt.
Wikileaks also unveiled how Exceptionalistan doubted Brazil could design a nuclear submarine – a matter of national security. How construction company Odebrecht was going global. How Petrobras by itself developed the technology to explore the pre-salt deposits – the largest oil discovery of the young 21st century, of which Big Oil was excluded by none other than Lula.
Then, as a result of Snowden’s revelations, the Rousseff administration required all government agencies to use state-owned companies for their technology services. This would mean that US companies could lose as much as $35 billion in revenue over two years as they would be deprived of business in the 7th largest economy in the world – as research group Information Technology & Innovation Foundation discovered.
The future is happening now
The march towards Hybrid War in Brazil had little do to with the political left or right. It was basically about mobilizing a few wealthy families that actually run the country; buy large swathes of Congress; control mainstream media; behave like 19th century slave plantation owners (slavery still permeates all social relations in Brazil); and legitimize it all via a hefty, yet bogus, intellectual tradition.
They would give the signal for the mobilization of the middle class.
Sociologist Jesse de Souza identified a Freudian “substitutive gratification” phenomenon under which the Brazilian middle class – with large swathes now clamoring for regime change - imitates the wealthy few as much as it’s ruthlessly exploited by them, via mountains of taxes and sky-high interest rates.
The wealthy 0,0001% and the middle classes needed an Other to demonize – Exceptionalistan style. And what could be more perfect for the judicial-police-media-old comprador elite complex than the figure of a tropical Saddam Hussein: former President Lula.
Ultra right-wing “movements” financed by the nefarious Koch Brothers suddenly popped up on social networks and street protests. The Brazilian attorney general visited the Empire of Chaos leading a Car Wash team to hand out Petrobras information that could prop up possible Department of Justice indictments.
Car Wash and the – immensely corrupt - Brazilian Congress, which will now deliberate over the possible impeachment of President Rousseff, revealed themselves as indistinguishable.
By then, the scriptwriters were sure that a regime change social infrastructure was already built into a critical anti-government mass, thus allowing the color revolution’s full bloom. The way to a soft coup was paved – without even having to resort to lethal urban terrorism (as in Ukraine). The problem was that if the soft coup failed – as it now seems at least possible – it would be very hard to unleash a hard coup, Pinochet-style, via UW, against the beleaguered Rousseff administration; that is, finally accomplishing Full Hybrid War.
On a socioeconomic level, Car Wash would only be fully “successful” if mirrored by a softening up of Brazilian laws regulating oil exploration, opening it up for US Big Oil. And in parallel, all social spending programs would have to be smashed.
Instead, what’s happening now is the progressive mobilization of Brazilian civil society against a white coup/soft coup/regime change scenario. Crucial actors in Brazilian society are now firmly positioned against the impeachment of President Rousseff, from the Catholic church to evangelicals; first tier university professors; at least 15 state governors; masses of union workers and “informal economy” workers; artists; leading intellectuals; jurists; the overwhelming majority of lawyers; and last but not least, the “deep Brazil” that legally elected Rousseff with 54.5 million votes.
It ain’t over till some fat man in the Brazilian Supreme Court sings. What’s certain is that independent Brazilian academics are already laying down the theoretical bases to study Car Wash not as a mere, massive anti-corruption drive; but as the ultimate case study of Exceptionalistan’s geopolitical strategy applied to a sophisticated globalized environment dominated by infotech and social networks. The whole developing world should be fully alert – and learn the relevant lessons, as Brazil is bound to be analyzed as the ultimate case of Soft Hybrid War.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
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