Latest articles
The Western Denial Of The Eastern Origins of Their Civilization
by Bruce Lerro / February 28th, 2025
Orientation
Situating my article
Often the rise of China and the Middle East appears to many Westerners as something recent, maybe 30 years old. Before that? Is Western dominance beginning with the Greeks and Romans – right? Wrong, not even close! The rise of the East and the South has roughly a 1,300 year history of dominance from 500 CE to 1800 CE. What is happening in the East today is no “Eurasian Miracle”. With the wind of 1,300 years at its back, it is returning to its long historical prominence today.
In two …
They live among us. They're everywhere
by Jonathan Cook / February 28th, 2025
Walter Salles’ new film on the disappearances of regime critics in 1970s Brazil is a powerful reminder that the ghouls who defend the slaughter in Gaza are biding their time.
Walter Salles’ new film I’m Still Here, is a moving, true-story, Oscar-nominated portrait of a middle-class, leftwing family in Rio de Janeiro in the early 1970s struggling to come to terms with the father’s disappearance – 25 years later confirmed as murder – by the Brazilian military dictatorship.
The mother and a teenage daughter spend time inside a regime torture camp too, before …
by Allen Forrest / February 28th, 2025
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks to communicate between networks, devices, and users. Sounds good, but is there a darker side?
by Binoy Kampmark / February 28th, 2025
Guantánamo Bay has been a fiendish experiment in US law for decades. The fiendishness lies in the subversion. Operating as a naval base in Cuba, this contentious facility has been the site and location for the cruelties of paranoia and empire, a place where such laws as due process are subverted, and the presumption to innocence soiled. In this contorted way, the civilian and military branches have mingled and corrupted, the result proving a nightmare for legal authorities keen to ensure that such a facility does, at the very least, observe that sad, dusty relic known as the rule of …
by Eric Zuesse / February 28th, 2025
When America’s Founders declared on 4 July 1776 their willingness to risk “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor,” in order to establish justice in their land — our land — they were throwing down the gauntlet to the evil acts that their exploiters had perpetrated upon them, and against their evil perpetrators who had carried it out. They did this not by calling them evil, but by categorizing and providing an itemized list of their “usurpations,” such that “a candid world” would recognize these acts …
In Nicaragua, the evidence suggests it was
by John Perry / February 27th, 2025
President Trump has just closed down USAID after Elon Musk branded it “a criminal organization,” adding “it’s time for it to die.” Is there any truth at all in Musk’s allegation?
One “beneficiary” of USAID is Nicaragua, a country with one of the lowest incomes per head in Latin America. Between 2014 and 2021, USAID spent US$315,009,297 on projects there. Uninformed observers might suppose that this money helped poor communities, but they would be wrong. Most of it was spent trying to undermine Nicaragua’s government, and in the process gave lucrative contracts to US consultancies and to some of Nicaragua’s richest …
Death of Muammar Gaddafi: A turning point in history
by Dan Lieberman / February 27th, 2025
The “take no prisoners” philosophy and “slash and burn” techniques of the Trump deadministration has its partisans, eager to release their suppressed fury at a glorified past that is being barred from the future. A new world order of rich, powerful, and self-absorbed supremos#2 replaces the previous “carefully constructed fake world,” where rich, powerful, and self-absorbed supremos#1 conspired with the media to delude the public by cheeky references to caring and sharing, while global exploitation, instability, and violence directed their lives. Quoting others, “The entire liberal deep state command and control system is broken.” Quoting nobody, “An anti-liberal deep state …
by Allen Forrest / February 27th, 2025
How effective are petitions at influencing governments?
An article in EPJ Data Science concludes “that the vast majority of petitions do not achieve any measure of success; over 99 percent fail to get the 10,000 signatures required for an official response and only 0.1 percent attain the 100,000 required for a parliamentary debate (0.7 percent in the US).”
“Rapid rise and decay in petition signing.”
Can Palestinians get a little Humanitarian Intervention?
by Ajamu Baraka / February 27th, 2025
Of all the ideological mystifications created by the white West to rationalize and justify its brutal exploitation and colonization of the world the last five hundred years, the cruelest hoax ever perpetrated on the colonized and the entire world is the idea that the West has the capacity or intent to define and protect something called human rights.
The conquest fueled by advanced weapons and a style of war that has as its objective the annihilation of the enemy, the barbarians that poured out of what became “Europe” into what was eventually named the Americas burned, murdered, raped …
by Philip A. Faruggio / February 27th, 2025
Before I begin on the Democrats, allow me to make this assertion: The Republican Party, for as long as this baby boomer can remember, are but a pack of wolves. They devour anything that is for working stiffs and the poor. Recently, the Republicans are pushing this lie that their reinstatement of Trump’s tax cuts will “Help small business and working people.” Meanwhile, the overwhelming benefit will be for the Super Rich and Corporate America, and not Mom and Pop.
Onto the Democrats. Factor out but a minor percentage of both their legislators and supporters and you have a party of …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / February 26th, 2025
Anyone who wants to put America first needs to start by putting the Constitution first.
This should be non-negotiable.
Winning an election does not give President Trump—or any politician—the authority to sidestep the Constitution and remake the government at will.
That’s not how a constitutional republic works, even in pursuit of the so-called greater good.
Thus far, those defending the Trump administration’s worst actions, which range from immoral and unethical to blatantly unconstitutional, have resorted to repeating propaganda and glaring non-truths while insisting that the Biden administration was worse.
“They did it first” and “they did …
A Lament in Poetry and Prose
by Phil Rockstroh / February 26th, 2025
‘Francisco Goya, ‘Disasters of War’ ‘What good is a cup?’
Naivety can be rectified by experience. Yet stupid, and its attendant willful and belligerent ignorance, is a hazard to all near it. Trump careens down his death-besotted path as the Democrats simply step out of his way.
Democrats, smugly muttering, “I told you so,” will not suffice. Antiduopolists could retort, we warned you against rigging the apparatus of the Democratic Party in an attempt to enthrone Hillary, then, because stupid tends to double down on fuckwit, rigging the process for Biden.
The arming of genocidal Zionists …
by Allen Forrest / February 26th, 2025
What happens when you violate community standards?
by Binoy Kampmark / February 26th, 2025
It has the feeling of a ghastly ending, one pushed along by desperation and eagerness. First, levelling Gaza and turning it to an uninhabitable moonscape, with the promise of a territory free of Palestinians. Then, displacing and destroying the already precarious holdings of Palestinian residents in the West Bank, all the time subjecting them to curfews, arrests and detentions while aiding vigilante Jewish settlers, firming up the system of segregation and snuffing out any prospect of autonomy.
The campaign of rendering the Palestinian cause for sovereignty extinct has become an article of faith for Israel’s security forces, and spectators stare, glumly, …
by Alfred de Zayas / February 26th, 2025
One year ago, on 25 February 2024 the 25-year old US Airman Aaron Bushnell self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. to protest against the Israeli genocide of tens of thousands of Palestinians, he said that he refused to be “complicit in the genocide of Palestinians”, and as his body burnt in flames, he cried out six times “Free Palestine”.
The politicians in Washington, London, Paris and Berlin took no notice. No one cared. Washington and the Europeans continued delivering lethal weapons to Israel, weapons to kill more women …
by Roger Keeran / February 25th, 2025
On December 2, 2024, MLToday posted Ruth Needleman’s review of Jeff Schuhrke’s outstanding book, Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade (London: Verso). Without taking anything away from either the reviewer or the author, I would like to make a few supplementary points.
Needleman credits Schuhrke with providing “a clearly written, comprehensive and meticulously documented account of the AFL-CIO’s decades of subversive actions aimed at dividing, replacing or just destroying labor federations and movements throughout the world.” In the name of fighting communism, this campaign began before the …
by William T. Hathaway / February 25th, 2025
In Sunday’s election in Germany a new party, Alternatives for Germany, broke through the established power structure to become the second strongest force in parliament. A key factor in its success was a call to overcome the postwar guilt and shame that have been predominant in the country. For many years these were a necessary reckoning with past atrocities, but this burden of blame has increasingly lamed the country and become a handicap to its progress. Leaving it behind is part of a gradual evolution that has been going on since the 1990s.
When I came to Germany in 1993 as …
by Jared Sacks / February 25th, 2025
Imperialist Donald Trump unleashed Elon Musk for a hostile takeover of the US government. (Evan Vucci/AP Photo/picture alliance)
The gradual worldwide shift towards fascism over the past 10 years has significantly elevated the threat of world annihilation. Though this might sound alarmist, as a student of history, there are certainly significant parallels with the 1920s and 1930s one can draw on.
Only today the threat is even greater. With massive stockpiles of nuclear weapons held by at least nine countries, one …
by Allen Forrest / February 25th, 2025
Belief without evidence is illogical and, arguably, unethical.
by John Rachel / February 25th, 2025
“Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”
Spoken by a fellow in a time when tolerance and trust, faith in the essential goodness of human beings, belief in turn-the-other-cheek stoicism, all were still possible. It was innovative even back then, but an option which could be considered.
These are different times. No longer does innocence bloom. Hope is a four-letter word, gutted by abuse, now a contemptuous metaphor for hypocrisy and cunning. Faith, charity and love have been quantified, digitized, commodified, sexualized, turned into more weapons of mass deception and poisoning of the human spirit, just …
The Comical, Frightening Mike Burgess
by Binoy Kampmark / February 25th, 2025
Never allow intelligence chiefs to speak publicly. Their prerogative lies in lying, their reassurance, cool deception. While the attractions of transparency are powerful, the result of a garrulous spook is always going to be unreliable.
In Australia, a comically looking individual by the name of Mike Burgess terrorises and terrifies the local populace as head of the Australian Secret Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), the domestic spy agency. It will surprise no one familiar with this approach that it resembles several that have come before. Keep them frightened, soften them for the next encroaching round, and await ever larger budgets for the already …
by Michael K. Smith / February 24th, 2025
Malcolm was our manhood, our living black manhood.
— Ossie Davis
Treat me like a man, or kill me.
— Malcolm X[1]
February 21, 2025 marked sixty years since Malcolm X was gunned down in a hail of bullets at the Audobon Ballroom in New York City as he was starting to give a speech. The previous week his house had been firebombed, and days before that the French government had refused to allow him into the country to fulfill a speaking engagement, apparently fearing the assassination might take place on French soil.
Malcolm fully expected these attempts …
by William T. Hathaway / February 24th, 2025
The German establishment is in crisis. Is has ruled for 80 years by charting a middle course between progressive and conservative policies. Labor and business have cooperated to achieve social and economic stability. But that consensus isn’t functioning anymore. The standard of living is declining, crime is increasing, fear and anger infect social discourse. Nothing the mainstream political parties have done has improved the situation.
The fundamental cause for this crisis is the decay of capitalism. This long-term trend is forcing European and North American governments into more intense exploitation: reducing benefits at home and aggressively manipulating the economies and politics …
by Gary Olson / February 24th, 2025
The final results for German’s Bundestag election show that the Alternative for Germany or AfD finishing a strong second with 20.8% and 152 seats. The CDU/CSU finished first by garnering 28.52% and 208 seats, while Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats had a record low 16% and 120 seats.
The New York Times found that the overriding concern in German life according to interviews and polls, and the thing most likely to drive the choice of voters, is the country’s anemic economy.” (NYT, 2/22/25). I don’t know how typical she is, but one probable AfD voter volunteered that she didn’t share all …
by Allen Forrest / February 24th, 2025
by B.R. Gowani / February 24th, 2025
Ruttie Jinnah and M.A. Jinnah IMAGE/Dawn
Read Part 1.
Drugs
Ruttie’s rush to dash off to Paris was to get drugs. Mrs. Naidu’s letters from Paris and New York to Padmaja make that clear.
While in Paris in 1929, Mrs. Naidu incidentally discovered from a princess (cousin of queen of Italy), who knew Ruttie, the reason for her visits to Paris. She said that “Madam Zhinna” had been getting drugs through “the long needle,” that is, morphine since her Paris visit in 1924. The concerned princess informed Mrs. …
by Binoy Kampmark / February 24th, 2025
Cowardice is the milk that runs in the veins of many event organisers, especially when it comes to those occasions that might provoke the unmanaged unexpected. The same organisers will claim to be open minded, accommodating to stirring debate, and open to what is trendily termed in artistic lingo as “provocations”.
The dropping by Creative Australia of Lebanese-born artist Khaled Sabsabi as Australia’s representative for the 2026 Venice Biennale, along with the curator of the pavilion’s artistic team, Michael Dagostino, shows that true artistic subversion is not the game, and uncontroversial subservience the form. If an arts body fears that the …
by Stephen Joseph Scott / February 22nd, 2025
This planned investigation, titled Philadelphia and The Darkside of Liberty, is a deliberate examination into the cultural, economic, and sociopolitical foundations which undergirded America’s early colony and its newly birthed land of liberty’s class-stratified slave society – combined with a closer look at the contradictions which laid within the notions and/or paradoxes of early American equality, freedom, race, and enslavement (commencing in the seventeenth-century). This proposed study therefore will contend that to appreciate the early interpretations of American political organization, it is essential to understand its beginnings – centering on the U.S. …
by Allen Forrest / February 22nd, 2025
Southcom's Double-Speak
by Francisco Dominguez and Roger D. Harris / February 22nd, 2025
Admiral Alvin Hosley demonstrated selective outrage over the fear of multipolarity in the Western Hemisphere. The Southcom commander confirmed the official US military doctrine for the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region on February 13, before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
In a poorly disguised assertion of US hegemony, Hosley envisioned, “an enduring commitment to democratic principles…to engender security, capability, democratic norms, and resilience that fuel regional peace, prosperity, and sovereignty.”
Threats to the vision of a Pax Americana
Foremost of the “threats to this vision” is the “methodical incursion into the region” by China, secondarily by Russia, and a distant …
