Anyone who’s paying attention knows the behavior of the U.S. war machine is as relevant to Australians as it is to Americans, writes Caitlin Johnstone.
The question today is how the Russian government will react to the protests. Russian wives and mothers have played a destabilizing role in other wars and they are now working to destabilize the current war against Ukraine. While many supported Putin’s initial moves, today they realize they are losing their sons and brothers for no reason other than to fulfill Putin’s maniacal desire to conquer Ukraine. Putin and his henchmen will attempt to assuage the women – while working to silence them as soon as possible. Putin needs their men to fight his ego war – even if it means he must destroy Russia’s entire male population once and for all.
If the powerful leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senators Jack Reed (D-RI) and Jim Inhofe (R-OK), have their way, Congress will soon invoke wartime emergency powers to build up even greater stockpiles of Pentagon weapons.
We are being led in our anti-China hysteria by the United States which is not concerned that China will attack us, or even the United States, but is concerned that its world hegemony is being challenged.
History forgotten, Losers in past conflict, Vietnam, Aghanistan, Iraq, Syria,
How do we explain that half the Australian community thinks we should go to war with China? After twenty years of conflict in the Middle East, will our addiction to war and our insouciance about its consequences finally catch up with us in an American war over Taiwan?
A recent Lowy Institute poll showed that just over half the Australian population is not in favour of supporting the United States in a war against China.
May, Russian forces occupying the village told residents that a corridor had been opened to Ukrainian-controlled territory. Nataliya and others boarded a bus that they were told was headed to Kharkiv. But when the bus stopped, she realized they were in Shebekino, a city just across the border.
“I suddenly realized that we were in Russia,” Nataliya told human rights investigators. “We didn’t even go through a border crossing.”
With Russia and the U.S. currently on the warpath during the escalating conflict in Ukraine, the world is again at serious risk of nuclear disaster, writes Dr Helen Caldicott.
May 9 is known as Russia’s Victory Day. As Putin’s long-term Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov doubled down on the claim that the invasion was a “special operation” aimed at “de-nazifying” Ukraine, US State Department spokesman Ned Price said on Monday there was “good reason to believe that the Russians will do everything they can to use” May 9 to justify the war.
When the history of this horror is written, NATO and Joe Biden will get enormous credit as well. Their steady hands and steadfast strategy appear to be working. Patience, tenacity, and careful use of every tool available to them — short of putting NATO or American troops into Ukraine — is turning the tide. We have no way of knowing how this will turn out (and I continue to fear what a cornered Putin may resort to), but the courage and intelligence of Ukraine, NATO, and Biden deserve our commendation and thanks.
Hitler killed himself he only had a gun. Putin will kill every one else;
The Russians will not thank him for destroying their economy, the Russian troops’ parents and families will not thank him for killing their sons, and the Ukrainian people will never accept the reason for the invasion, or its apparent objective: The subjugation of its identity and status as a sovereign nation. The death and destruction means there will never be reconciliation between Russia and Ukraine.
Putin’s war is a grave mistake, and hundreds of thousands will pay the price. The greatest threat comes from Putin, and his absolute hold on power. He, if cornered, might pull out all the stops, and attempt to bluff the Unites States and Europe with the threat of nuclear war. The possibility is there, and it looks to be Putin’s last card.
For sixty years, the United States’ blockade against Cuba has worked to hinder the island’s development and prevent it from trading even with third countries. It’s time Washington stopped its cruel punishment of its smaller neighbor.
This week, 27 foreign policy experts called for a no-fly zone in Ukraine that would lead to the shooting down of Russian planes — an idea that could lead to a nuclear holocaust. Their message is being bankrolled by arms manufacturers and fossil fuel interests. War,
“Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us,” declared Russian President Vladimir Putin last week. “It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space.” This conception of Ukrainian history forms the bedrock of Putin’s justification for invading the former Soviet republic, independent since 1991. On this week’s podcast, Ryan Grim talks with Ukrainian sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko about his country’s history, from the Dark Ages up the current war. They discuss Ukraine’s history of anarchist politics, the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution that toppled pro-Moscow President Viktor Yanukovych, and the tangled question of modern Ukrainian identity.
Can we even bother to believe him will the camera be there? He won’t be the only one in the L-NP to have contracted Covid-19. Morrison is looking for sympathy in all the wrong places. Mr Hulot (Scamo) takes a holiday yet again and during the war on floods to plan promises he won’t keep and on how and to whom he will sell his $16Bn war chest for votes.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison says he has tested positive to COVID-19 but will continue to carry out his responsibilities while he recovers. “I am experiencing flu-like symptoms and will be recovering over the next week,” Mr Morrison said in a statement announcing that he had tested positive on Tuesday night.
Biden has been wedged by neo-Nazis and a Russian Imperialist in a face-off. Who does he side with. Putin has false flags in place in the Southern Donbass region of Ukraine to justify his invasion. Biden can’t for a moment justify he’s even saving a Democracy.
While Senate Democrats consider a way forward to send Ukraine hundreds of millions of dollars so it can buy new weapons, some of the most influential advocates are neglecting measures to make sure they don’t wind up with the country’s notorious neo-Nazis.
Pearl harbour was a target and the naval base destroyed 25% of the pop of Hawaii were American Japanese and they were interned. Why is Morrison and Dutton intent on making Australia the foremost target in the region?
Then, on November 29 2021, the US Defence Department announced in its global posture review that it will concentrate military activities and infrastructure in Australia and select Pacific Islands. There’s no question the US and the UK are returning to the Pacific at levels not seen since the second world war. The AUKUS agreement, initiated by the Morrison government, encapsulates the escalating tensions due to China’s troubling acts. These include its rhetorical and trade war with Australia, aggressions towards Taiwan, military expansion in the South China Sea and its deepening influence in the Pacific islands as a suspected veiled means to project its military power. Australia’s prime minister and, most recently, defence minister have conjured up the Pacific War, saying “we live in the echoes of the 1930s”, citing “mistakes” that led to the war. China has lashed back, criticising the Australian government for super-charging fears that history is repeating at a terrifying scale and pace.
Labor pulled us out of that one in 72 and is doing the same for this one and 60% support Dan while over 90% have been willingly vaccinated. On the scale of things mandates haven’t resulted in the sackings of hundreds but have made work enviroments safer. Morrison isn’t “against mandates and for freedom” in fact he wants to pass a Bill and mandate against LGBTQIs
Scott Morrison’s chant over “people wanting their lives back” recalled some 200 young men dead in Vietnam, conscripted by his political Party, the Liberals, who cannot have their lives back. Prime Minister Scott Mo
America since WW2 has never been for peace but rather “redefining” war.
“That drone strike in Kabul was not the last act of our war,” Representative Malinowski said during Blinken’s congressional testimony. “It was unfortunately the first act of the next stage of our war.”
Strap in for a media blitz on the threat from China. Prime Minister #ThatFellaDownUnder Scott Morrison and his merry band are about to take a war to the election. Michael West reports.
The PM’s army of propagandists has been working around the clock over the past two days marketing the latest announcement to a fawning press: AUKUS, a new “Alliance for the Ages as China Threat Grows”, according to The Australian. And what results!
Christian Porter’s secret legal payments are off the front pages, as is the JobKeeper mega-rort, the biggest transfer of wealth in history from working Australians to wealthy Australians and foreign corporations.
Early Thursday morning there was no AUKUS. The AFR did have a scoop though, splashing with: “PM to announce $90b French submarine deal is dead”.
Noam Chomsky talks to Jacobin about why the US withdrawal from Afghanistan won’t change US imperialism, the many war crimes of George W. Bush, and why he still believes in average people’s ability to push back against the war machine.
And then the Soviet Union collapsed — and nothing changed in the U.S. military’s global posture. Or, put differently, everything changed. For with the implosion of the USSR, what turned out to remain truly uncontained was our military, along with the dreams of neoconservatives who sought to remake the world in America’s image. But which image? That of a republic empowering its citizens in a participatory democracy or of an expansionist capitalist empire, driven by the ambition and greed of a set of oligarchs?
The American warfare state’s upper reaches are filled with bloodthirsty megalomaniacs. But few have been as deranged as Donald Rumsfeld, whose appetite for imperial violence combined with free market zealotry produced one of the most spectacular failures in all of US military history.
Another Senate Estimates session brings another culture war attack on the ABC. This time it is the revelation that Government senators are apparently monitoring the Twitter feeds of prominent ABC journalists to see what they “like” and using this information to accuse them of… oh, who knows what, this time?! It’s becoming both tedious and absurd.
Rather than rely solely on the US, Australia should bolster its own defence capabilities. At the same time, it should collaborate more with regional partners across Southeast Asia and beyond, particularly Indonesia, Japan, India and South Korea, to deter further belligerence and mitigate the risk of tensions escalating into open war.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people die (on average) 10 years younger than other Australians. Remote areas of Arnhem Land this figure doubles to 20-years.
The market doesn’t care about politics. It’s a creature that acts in accordance with the goals of its largest participants. The real economy, on the other hand, requires far more effort — planning, prioritizing, and executing programs and projects that can produce tangible profits. We’re a long way from a world that puts investment in the real economy ahead of those soaring financial markets. That gap, in fact, might as well be like the distance between Earth and Mars. In the midst of a pandemic, as billionaires only grow richer and the markets soar, can there be any question that we’re experiencing a Martian invasion?
I have reported a number of wars. I have seen the remains of children and women and the elderly bombed and burned to death — their villages laid to waste, their petrified trees festooned with human parts. And much else. Perhaps that is why I reserve a specific contempt for those who promote the crime of rapacious war, who beckon it with bad faith and profanities, having never experienced it themselves. Their monopoly must be broken.
Donald Trump’s decision to launch of a full-throated declaration of war on the US electoral process this morning paves the way for what may well be a chaotic three months of legal and extra-legal efforts to thwart the result.
Facebook Twitter Reddit Email Why are Havana’s food markets so empty? For the Cuban people, the U.S. War on Venezuela stands out as a clear culprit contributing to these daily frustrations and hardships.
“When the government equips police departments like they’re equipping the military, we undermine healthy relationships between the police and the community,” explains Equal Justice Initiative director Bryan Stevenson. “We have created a culture where police officers think of themselves as warriors, not guardians.”
Even after two decades of nearly unmitigated strategic failure in the Middle East coupled with the disastrous self-harm of unchecked defense spending, it seems that significant portions of the U.S. elite have still not awoken from their intoxication with foreign wars of choice. Amid a global pandemic that could kill millions and cripple the American economy for years to come, there are strong signs that the U.S. military might be ordered to embark on yet another war in Iraq
If this war does take place, we can place it into a larger context: a once-powerful country depleting its strength through costly military adventures in distant lands, but institutionally incapable of providing the basics of life for its people at home.
When you look back through the ignominious history of the Republican movement and the LNP, there isn’t a single right-wing MP worth a dime. Every commitment made to a vile, nasty off-shore war (such as Korea, Vietnam and the horrendous genocidal Iraqi war) has been under a Republican/LNP government who consistently use war, terror, hatred and fear to divide nations. When things look bleak in the polls, the war-mongering right-wing are always prepared to stoop to using war as the last resort to cling onto power with bloodstained fingers – ready and willing to sacrifice millions of lives and spend billions to distract focus from their horrendous policies and/or use hatred and division for their own political agenda. It is always a hate-filled, xenophobic right wing government that drags us into war and it always takes a left-wing, socialist government to get us out of it!
But the more clearly the American public understands the falsehood and the moral, legal and political bankruptcy of the justifications for our country’s disastrous wars, the more clearly we can challenge the absurd claims of warmongering politicians whose policies offer the world only more death, destruction and chaos. Trump’s blundering, murderous Iran policy is only the latest example, and, despite its catastrophic results, U.S. militarism remains tragically bipartisan, with a few honorable exceptions.
When the U.S. stops killing people and bombing their homes, and the world starts helping people to support and protect themselves and their families without joining U.S.-backed armed forces or the armed groups they are fighting, then and only then will the raging conflicts that U.S. militarism has ignited across the world begin to subside.
olddogthoughts 