USA
Escalation With Iran Seemingly Over; Now We Have To Worry About Rafah
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/38fe97418d49cfe988ef563a14d32733/href
The imperial media are reporting that Israel launched a missile attack against Iran early Friday morning, with explosions also seen in Syria and Iraq. Tehran is denying there was any missile attack on Iran at all, with Iranian media reporting that the blasts were actually from drones that were successfully shot down over Iran. It doesn’t appear that any nuclear sites were struck.
A senior Iranian official has reportedly told Reuters that Iran has no plans for any immediate response to Israel, which is good because Tehran has previously stated that if Israel makes another “mistake” it will result in immediate retaliation. Israel’s extremist national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir tweeted a word in Hebrew which roughly translates to “feeble” in an apparent reference to the Israeli attack, signaling his disapproval at Israel’s failure to ignite World War Three.
So as things stand right now it looks like the cycle of escalation between Iran and Israel has thankfully ended or at least paused, which means now all we have to worry about is a horrific massacre in southern Gaza. The Times of Israel reports that Washington has agreed to go along with Israel’s planned assault on the city of Rafah so long as Israel doesn’t launch a large attack against Iran in response to its unprecedented retaliatory drone and missile attack on Saturday, according to an Egyptian source speaking to a Qatari outlet. A White House spokesperson has denied this, but you’d expect them to.
Matthew Petti on Twitter: "Egyptian sources to The New Arab: "the US has accepted Israel's plan for an operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, in return for not carrying out a large strike in Iran in response to Tehran's unprecedented missile and drone attack." https://t.co/PA5A7EWixI / Twitter"
Egyptian sources to The New Arab: "the US has accepted Israel's plan for an operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, in return for not carrying out a large strike in Iran in response to Tehran's unprecedented missile and drone attack." https://t.co/PA5A7EWixI
Israel had reportedly notified the US earlier on Thursday that an attack on Iran was coming, and that nuclear sites would not be damaged. If all Israel did was launch a small attack on Iran that did no significant damage, that would certainly fit the bill for the kind of strike that was alleged by the aforementioned Egyptian source.
As Dr Assal Rad said on Twitter regarding this report, “If this is true, Biden is green lighting a massacre so that Israel doesn’t start a wider war with Iran.”
Iran’s retaliatory strike for Israel’s attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus reportedly delayed Israel’s planned assault on Rafah, where according to CNN the IDF was ready to begin dropping leaflets on Monday. Israel has spent the last six months kettling the population of the Gaza Strip southward into Rafah, so now it’s extremely densely populated and a full-on attack could be deadlier than anything we’ve seen in Gaza so far.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
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“Rules-Based Order” Means Rules For Thee But Not For We
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/20449f47f45858b291f5050b8bc2786a/href
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Israel’s allowed to bomb an Iranian consulate, but Iran’s not allowed to strike back. The US is allowed to surround China with war machinery, but it would be World War Three if China ever tried to militarily encircle the US. NATO is allowed to expand to Russia’s doorstep and amass proxy forces on its border, but the last time Moscow placed a credible military threat anywhere near the United States, the US responded so aggressively that the world almost ended.
The “rules-based international order” that the US-centralized power structure purports to uphold just means an order in which the US makes up the rules and nations had better obey them. It means rules for thee but not for me.
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Democrats are currently committing genocide, pushing through terrifying NSA surveillance powers, and working to imprison a journalist for life for telling the truth about US war crimes, but it’s very important to support Biden because if Trump wins, fascism might come to America.
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The Assange extradition case is like if the mafia was demanding a snitch be extradited to Italy and multiple nations collaborated with them to help make this happen, except in this case the snitch is a journalist who told the truth, and the mob happens to run a global superpower.
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The imperial media are once again trotting out John Bolton to help sell the idea of war with Iran. This monster belongs in a cage, not on camera. The fact that the mainstream western press keep having this completely discredited bloodthirsty psychopath on their shows to advocate every possible US war proves that our entire civilization is diseased.
John Bolton on Twitter: "To call on Israel not to act in self-defense is reprehensible. By saying that Israel had a "win" simply because no one died encourages belligerent dictatorships like Iran to strike again. I'd like to hear from one politician who would call for restraint if hundreds of missiles... pic.twitter.com/ze0teJTnDe / Twitter"
To call on Israel not to act in self-defense is reprehensible. By saying that Israel had a "win" simply because no one died encourages belligerent dictatorships like Iran to strike again. I'd like to hear from one politician who would call for restraint if hundreds of missiles... pic.twitter.com/ze0teJTnDe
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Israel’s actions over the last six months have made it abundantly clear that Biden’s stated goal of preventing the outbreak of more war in the middle east and his stated “ironclad” support for Israel are two mutually exclusive positions. You can do one or the other, but not both.
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Outside the mainstream press the news about Ukraine is a nonstop deluge of stories about how badly things are going for them.
Here are some recent articles from Antiwar.com:
“Ukraine’s Top General Says Situation on the Battlefield Has ‘Significantly Worsened’” discusses Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi’s acknowledgement that Russia is making steady gains and that the frontlines in Ukraine are at risk of collapsing wherever Russia focuses its offensive.
“US General Says Russia’s Military Is Bigger Than Before Ukraine Invasion” quotes General Christopher Cavoli saying “The army is actually now larger — by 15% — than it was when it invaded Ukraine,” an acknowledgement that Washington’s stated goal of using this proxy war to “weaken” Russia has failed.
“Russia Quickly Restores Oil Refinery Capability Hurt By Ukrainian Attacks” discusses how badly Russia is damaging Ukraine’s energy infrastructure compared to the damage Ukraine has been able to deal to Russia’s.
Here are a couple more from The Libertarian Institute:
“US Official Admits Ukraine Proxy War Failing to Weaken Russia” features an acknowledgement from Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell that Russia has reconstituted nearly all of its military losses in Ukraine.
“Ukraine Tightens Rules on Military Service, Angering Soldiers” reports on how “Ukraine’s legislature advanced multiple new laws that tighten rules on conscription and extend military services for those already in uniform.”
It’s absolutely criminal how the west pushed this country into sacrificing a generation to a war they always knew was unwinnable.
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Caitlin Johnstone on Twitter: "1. Deny bombing the consulate2. Say the consulate wasn't really a consulate3. Say Iran better not retaliate against you for that time you bombed the consulate4. Say you had no idea that Iran would make such a big deal about you bombing their consulate https://t.co/86cA0QK453 / Twitter"
1. Deny bombing the consulate2. Say the consulate wasn't really a consulate3. Say Iran better not retaliate against you for that time you bombed the consulate4. Say you had no idea that Iran would make such a big deal about you bombing their consulate https://t.co/86cA0QK453
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So much suffering and loss has been caused by the way people decided a long time ago that killing one person is murder and therefore immoral but killing thousands of people is “war” and therefore fine. The actual act is the same; only the narrative and the scale are different.
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Around the mid-1800s humanity began to notice it doesn’t make sense for a small group of rich people to own everything and for everyone else to continually give that group labor, rent and expenses just to stay alive, and ever since then the media, the mainstream culture and the foreign policy of the ruling class have been intensely devoted to aggressively erasing this realization from humanity’s memory.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
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Assange Extradition Case Moves Forward While The CIA Covers Its Tracks
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/8d572432e8f27bc3c5db22c0e53e896a/href
So they’re really doing it. The Biden administration is really ignoring Australia’s request to end the case against Julian Assange, and they’re proceeding with their campaign to extradite a journalist for telling the truth about US war crimes.
In order to move the extradition case forward, per a British high court ruling US prosecutors needed to provide “assurances” that the US would not seek the death penalty and would not deprive Assange of his human right to free speech because of his nationality. The US provided the assurance against the death penalty (which they’d previously opposed doing), and for the free speech assurance they said only that Assange will be able to “raise and seek to rely upon” US First Amendment rights, adding, “A decision as to the applicability of the First Amendment is exclusively within the purview of the U.S. Courts.”
Which is basically just saying “I mean, you’re welcome to TRY to have free speech protections?”
Consortium News on Twitter: "US Issues Assurances on Assange https://t.co/6a7osJoc82 UPDATED WITH TEXT OF DIPLOMATIC NOTE: The U.S. Tuesday filed assurances on the death penalty and the 1st Amendment, the latter of which Stella Assange called a "non-assurance." pic.twitter.com/KQNNeIQNYD / Twitter"
US Issues Assurances on Assange https://t.co/6a7osJoc82 UPDATED WITH TEXT OF DIPLOMATIC NOTE: The U.S. Tuesday filed assurances on the death penalty and the 1st Amendment, the latter of which Stella Assange called a "non-assurance." pic.twitter.com/KQNNeIQNYD
At the same time, CIA Director William Burns has filed a State Secrets Privilege demand to withhold information in a lawsuit against the agency by four American journalists and attorneys who were spied on during their visits to Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. State secrets privilege is a US evidentiary rule designed to prevent courts from revealing state secrets during civil litigation; the CIA began invoking it with the Assange lawsuit earlier this year.
Burns argues:
“I am asserting the state secrets and statutory privileges in this case as I have determined that either admitting or denying that CIA has information implicated by the remaining allegations in the Amended Complaint reasonably could be expected to cause serious — and in some cases, exceptionally grave — damage to the national security of the United States. After deliberation and personal consideration, I have determined that the complete factual bases for my privilege assertions cannot be set forth on the public record without confirming or denying whether CIA has information relating to this matter and therefore risking the very harm to U.S. national security that I seek to protect.”
Which is obviously a load of horse shit. As Assange himself tweeted in 2017, “The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security.” Burns isn’t worried about damaging “the national security of the United States,” he’s worried about the potential political fallout from information about the CIA spying on American lawyers and journalists while visiting a journalist who was being actively targeted by the legal arm of the US government.
Caitlin Johnstone on Twitter: "https://t.co/n1yfRuA8xy pic.twitter.com/COz405MbrJ / Twitter"
https://t.co/n1yfRuA8xy pic.twitter.com/COz405MbrJ
Political security is also why the US is working to punish Julian Assange for publishing inconvenient facts about US war crimes. The Pentagon already acknowledged years ago that the Chelsea Manning leaks for which Assange is being prosecuted didn’t get anyone killed and had no strategic impact on US war efforts, so plainly this isn’t about national security. It’s just politically damaging for the criminality of the US government to be made public for all to see.
They’re just squeezing and squeezing this man as hard as they can for as long as they can get away with to keep him silent and make an example of him to show what happens when journalists reveal unauthorized information about the empire. Just like Gaza, the persecution of Julian Assange makes a lie of everything the US and its western allies claim to stand for, and reveals the cruel face of tyranny beneath the mask of liberal democracy.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Featured image via Adobe Stock.
Israel’s Latest Lie Is That It Has ‘No Choice’ But To Attack Iran
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/7d211184966559667a062dac16ffab4f/href
In an article titled “Israel vows to retaliate against Iran for missile attacks,” Axios reports that the Israeli defense minister has informed his American counterpart that Israel “has no choice” but to attack Iran for the retaliatory strike it launched in response to Israel’s deadly attack on the Iranian embassy in Damascus.
“Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant told Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin Sunday that Israel has no choice but to respond to the unprecedented missile and drone attack launched by Iran over the weekend,” reports Axios, citing an anonymous US official and another unnamed source.
The state of Israel has been churning out massive lies on a daily basis for the last six months, but this whopper could wind up being the most consequential.
Antiwar.com on Twitter: "Report: Israel Tells US It Has No Choice But To Respond to IranIsraeli TV reports that Israel's War Cabinet has decided it will attack Iran, but it's unclear how or whenby Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #Israel #Iran #Gaza https://t.co/bcs6DQgDsb pic.twitter.com/x3C51NQcse / Twitter"
Report: Israel Tells US It Has No Choice But To Respond to IranIsraeli TV reports that Israel's War Cabinet has decided it will attack Iran, but it's unclear how or whenby Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #Israel #Iran #Gaza https://t.co/bcs6DQgDsb pic.twitter.com/x3C51NQcse
Obviously Israel has a choice as to whether it continues to escalate a conflict it initiated with an extreme act of aggression. This fraudulent apartheid ethnostate is so accustomed to crying victim every minute of every day that it will even pretend to be the victim of its own conscious decisions.
As professor Jason Hickel put it on Twitter, “People need to understand that Israel *does not* need to retaliate. Iran’s action was a telegraphed response to Israel’s bombing of its consulate, which killed 16 people and violated the Vienna Convention. Iran says they now consider the matter closed. Israel must de-escalate.”
Iran’s deputy foreign minister Ali Bagheri has made it clear that if Israel launches another attack against Iran, this time Iran’s response will be instantaneous instead of a twelve-day grace period with Tehran giving neighboring countries and the United States a 72-hour advance warning to ensure minimal damage to Israel.
Abas Aslani on Twitter: "Iranian DepFM Ali Bagheri says that #Iran will respond to a new mistake by #Israel "in seconds, not in days or hours". He said, "This time, they will not have 12 days". https://t.co/nKzXZncz4P / Twitter"
Iranian DepFM Ali Bagheri says that #Iran will respond to a new mistake by #Israel "in seconds, not in days or hours". He said, "This time, they will not have 12 days". https://t.co/nKzXZncz4P
Predictably, the Biden administration is doing its usual phony schtick where it pretends to be a passive witness to all this, with National Security spokesman John Kirby telling the press that the White House plans to just “wait and see what the Israelis decide to do.”
But as foreign policy analyst Tariq Kenney-Shawa noted of Kirby’s statement, “Israel will be using US-supplied weapons, will have to coordinate with US forces throughout the region, and will depend on the US for missile defense when Iran responds.” So the fact that the US won’t be actively planning the attack with Israel doesn’t mean the US won’t be involved in it on a fundamental level.
If Israel’s escalatory attack happens, it will be because Washington allowed it to. If the US informed Israel that it will instantly lose its pricey US weapons supplies and Pentagon support if it attacks Iran, Israel would discover very quickly that it does in fact have a choice as to whether or not to proceed.
https://medium.com/media/497752da3cdc952f5ad9f7a4ea87bfea/href
In an article for Foreign Policy titled “Netanyahu Wants War With Iran. Biden Can Prevent It.”, Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi argues that while Biden’s unconditional support for Israel is often described as a continuation of longstanding US policy, it has actually been a rather dramatic break from the norm. Presidents like Reagan, both Bushes, and Obama have not hesitated to give Israel’s arm a twist whenever they found it necessary to advance US interests in the region; this new policy of just letting Tel Aviv do whatever it wants while providing unconditional support is actually without precedent in the White House.
Both Israel and the US are pretending to be powerless in this situation, when in reality they’re both anything but. They’re like two muggers getting ready to mug someone and saying “If only there was something we could do to stop this terrible mugging!”
Israel absolutely can choose not to accelerate toward a terrifying war between extremely powerful militaries, and the US absolutely can choose to pump the brakes. The fact that neither of them are doing so is just what it looks like when you live under a globe-spanning empire that is fueled by human blood.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
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Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times – review
In Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, Samuel Moyn dissects intellectual battles within Cold War liberalism through six key figures: Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Hannah Arendt and Lionel Trilling. Teasing out their complex relationships with Enlightenment ideals, historicism, Freudianism and decolonisation, Moyn’s masterful group biography sheds light on the evolution of liberalism and the cause of the Red Scare, writes Atreyee Majumder.
In his most recent book, Samuel Moyn provides a set of intertwined intellectual profiles of six scholars of the Cold War, especially post-WWII era: Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Hannah Arendt and Lionel Trilling. Before I read Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, I had never come across the term Cold War liberalism. As Moyn clarifies, the term was coined in the 1960s by enemies of liberal ideas (presumably from within the Free World) emerging at the time, blaming “domestic compromises and foreign policy mistakes”. Moyn offers an intriguing argument that liberalism arrived at its current iteration through its defenders in the Anglo-American region during the Cold War.
Moyn offers an intriguing argument that liberalism arrived at its current iteration through its defenders in the Anglo-American region during the Cold War.
Interestingly, all the scholars in Moyn’s study except for Karl Popper are Jewish intellectuals of the post-Holocaust era or are children of American Jewish immigrants. An Austrian émigré in England, Popper was born Jewish but later converted to Lutheranism. Moyn takes great care not to reduce their loyalty to a certain iteration of liberalism to their religious identity (111). He employs an interesting writing strategy whereby he establishes a grapevine of conversations among these six figures and their various compatriot liberals. For instance, Shklar appears as a sharp critic of Hannah Arendt in Chapter five, while Berlin provides a corrective to Shklar’s rejection and blaming of Rousseau for sowing the roots of the red spectre with which the free world was confronted with in the twentieth century.
The first two chapters elaborate on Shklar and Berlin who have divergent attitudes towards the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Rousseau. Both are critical of the Enlightenment to the extent that they find themselves amplifying liberalism’s state-limiting function over its dimension of emphasising creative agency of the individual. They differ on the extent to which the Enlightenment could be held responsible for the rise of the Red Scare. It is in the Karl Popper chapter (Chapter Three) that the plot thickens, as Popper rejects “historicism” by way of rejecting Hegel and his infusion of the idea of progress with Christian “inevitabilism” (77, 80). As Moyn narrates, Popper held that history, if embraced, would mean the inevitable progress as argued for Hegel and later, in Marx’s terms, would lead to a communist version of progress that would usurp liberalism’s dominance. This anxiety made Popper reject the category of history itself. In fact, Jacob Talmon, the “slavish follower” of Popper, described “the idolization of history” as a “nineteenth century novelty” (80).
It is through Hannah Arendt that we see the uncomfortable relationship the Cold War liberals had with the decolonisation movements outside the west
The book reaches a crescendo in the last two chapters on Hannah Arendt and Lionel Trilling, respectively. It is through Hannah Arendt that we see the uncomfortable relationship the Cold War liberals had with the decolonisation movements outside the west; those that claimed the word ”freedom” for colonised populations. As a reader from the postcolony, I found it instructive to read Moyn’s discussion of Arendt’s ambivalence about reconciling her liberalism with the growing liberalisms of the former colonies. In an insightful section at the end of the Arendt chapter (137-8), Moyn discusses how nationalisms of these fledgling nations were objects of suspicion for Arendt and the Cold War liberals while they were eager to embrace the cause of Israel’s nationalism. In the final chapter we witness Lionel Trilling’s strange embrace of Freud’s psychoanalysis, especially Freud’s late work Civilization and its Discontents (1930). Trilling wanted to render a reformed liberalism – one that wasn’t so naïve and shocked at crisis or evil in the world. Moyn writes of Trilling’s use of Freud in working out his own theory of liberty and liberalism (152):
“…..Freudianism affected the theory of liberty. It turns out that people are constrained in the control they can win from the passions, and therefore in the freedom they should have in their self-making. They must use what autonomy they can gain in pitiless struggle with their own proclivities in the service of self-control.”
Trilling’s own treatment of Cold War liberalism […] could have arisen from his repeated attempts to process what he witnessed in Europe in the 1930s as fascism took hold
Trilling’s own treatment of Cold War liberalism, Moyn speculates, could have arisen from his repeated attempts to process what he witnessed in Europe in the 1930s as fascism took hold; Moyn writes that “he rationalized out of it a new liberalism” (153) – a kind of “survivalist” one. Trilling’s move for a reformed and less idealistic liberalism marked liberalism’s slow shift towards the right.
Moyn has written a masterful interconnected intellectual biography of Cold War liberals, unpacking arguments within the liberal establishment about what actually brought about the Red Scare.
Moyn has written a masterful interconnected intellectual biography of Cold War liberals, unpacking arguments within the liberal establishment about what actually brought about the Red Scare. Moyn also makes clear that these figures are not particularly worried about the institutional arrangement that will bring about such actualisation of freedoms and hence, their version of liberalism. Moyn often uses the term neoliberal and I understand that his usage is quite different from the commonplace social science use of that word – which is a political form accompanying the condition of late capitalism. Hence, I would have liked Moyn to delineate his specific use of the term. Moyn does discuss, especially, in the chapter on Hannah Arendt (Chapter Five), the discomfiture of the Cold War liberals with the rise of new nations across the globe, claiming for themselves the political and social goods of liberalism through their own interpretation of what these might entail. He especially mentions, David Scott’s indictment of Arendt for her erasure of Haiti (138). A blind spot about the rest of the world seems to have existed among the Cold War liberals, which Moyn could have explored further. Finally, I was curious about whether Western Marxism – of the Althusser variety (I believe many of them are writing at the same time as Althusser in the 1960s) – were at all in the conversations that the Cold War liberals engaged in. If so, how would they respond to the Althusserian idea that “freedom” as ideology that hides actual class relations in the name of a pleasurable political ideal which thereafter encodes their worlds of desire? Nonetheless, Liberalism Against Itself is an illuminating and, at times, counterintuitive account of the intellectual wars internal to liberal establishment while it was under attack during the Cold War.
Note: This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: DidemA on Shutterstock.
Anyone Who Wants The US To Attack Iran Is An Enemy Of Humanity
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/e9f333f515876746ad6366a1304ce09b/href
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Anyone who wants the US and its allies to attack Iran is a psychopath. People who want to unleash a war of that scale upon our species should be rejected from our society as aggressively as child molesters and Nazis.
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A new CNN report says multiple Biden administration officials “saw Iran’s attacks on Israel Saturday as disproportionate to Israel’s strikes in Damascus that prompted the retaliation.”
There are zero reported fatalities as a result of the Iranian retaliation. The Israeli strikes on the Iranian embassy in Damascus killed 16 people, including multiple high-level Iranian military officials. To see Iran’s response as “disproportionate” is to admit you believe Israeli lives are worth literally orders of magnitude more than Iranian lives.
And it was at an embassy, for god’s sake. Israel can assassinate 16 people while shattering decades of diplomatic norms, and in the eyes of the US that’s still not as bad as Iran creating a few potholes in an Israeli street.
And anyway how obscene is it that these shitstains can babble about proportionality at all after backing Israel’s mass atrocities in Gaza? When Iran attacks the response needs to be proportionate, but when Israel incinerates Gaza over October 7 it’s “LMAO fuck around and find out, laughcry emoji, Israeli flag.”
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Caitlin Johnstone on Twitter: "No no you don't understand, this time Germany is rounding up Jews to FIGHT antisemitism. https://t.co/uyhMBUmAfX / Twitter"
No no you don't understand, this time Germany is rounding up Jews to FIGHT antisemitism. https://t.co/uyhMBUmAfX
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After six months of mass murder and chaos the only thing that looks more absurd than the claim that Israel is morally superior to other nations in the middle east is the claim that the United States is morally superior to other nations in the world.
No matter how low your opinion was of western power structures and western civilization, if you’ve been watching events of the last six months with sincerity it will have sunk even lower by now.
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The Spectator Index on Twitter: "BREAKING: NBC News reports that 'President Joe Biden has privately expressed concern that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to drag the U.S. more deeply into a broader conflict' / Twitter"
BREAKING: NBC News reports that 'President Joe Biden has privately expressed concern that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to drag the U.S. more deeply into a broader conflict'
It’s so obnoxious how the mass media are helping the White House pretend this is something the Biden administration is just passively sitting around hoping doesn’t happen, as though the US hasn’t had the power to end all this every single day for the last six months.
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It’s just an easily quantifiable fact that the Trump administration was vastly less warlike and murderous than the Biden administration has been. This doesn’t mean Trump wasn’t warlike and murderous. It doesn’t even mean Trump wouldn’t have been doing more or less the same evil things that Biden has been doing if he’d won in 2020. But it does mean the entire mainstream liberal narrative about what Trump is and what Biden is has been complete bullshit this entire time, which necessarily means the whole mainstream narrative about the US political system is a lie.
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It’s possible that as the United States was first beginning to move toward planetary hegemony there were some empire managers operating in good faith who sincerely believed US unipolarity could be a force for achieving world peace. It’s doubtful that everyone constructing this monstrosity has been an evil, mustache-twirling cartoon villain who wanted to see nonstop violence, oppression and nuclear brinkmanship inflicted upon populations around the globe. But that’s what wound up happening.
And of course it did. The belief that a regime can take over the world by any amount of force necessary and create peace and prosperity for all was always a poorly reasoned fantasy of deeply unwise minds. Of course there are going to be populations who refuse to be subjugated, and some of them are going to have nuclear weapons, and others will have conventional weapons but defend their sovereignty tooth and claw. Most of the violence and cold war brinkmanship you see in international conflicts today is a direct result of this dynamic.
The US-centralized empire’s foreign policy is one long and unrelenting war against disobedience. It simply is not possible to bring the entire human species under one single power umbrella without copious amounts of violence and tyranny. If we keep going along this trajectory, the empire’s war on disobedience is going to lead to nuclear armageddon someday.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Featured image via Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED)
Empire Managers Keep Acting Like Iran Is About To Attack Israel Without Provocation
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/5ad9bf314291fbcc4307b0bcb79ddfef/href
Iran appears to be poised to launch an attack on Israel in retaliation for the Israeli strike on an Iranian consulate building adjacent to the Iranian embassy in Damascus, which killed 16 people including multiple Iranian military officers. Iranian forces have already seized an Israeli-linked cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz, and Tehran continues to vow that it will soon retaliate for the embassy attack at an undisclosed time.
Iran has reportedly said through Oman that the scope of the attack will be calibrated to avoid escalation into an all-out regional conflict. Reuters reports that Washington does not expect the retaliatory attack to be large enough to draw the US into war, so both Washington and Tehran appear to be saying basically the same thing about what’s coming. So as things stand right now it seems both sides see it as unlikely that this will be the spark to ignite a new war of profound horror in the middle east.
What’s really interesting about this situation right now is how western empire managers and propagandists have been framing the coming Iranian retaliation to suggest that Iran is about to attack Israel out of the blue, completely unprovoked. As though bombing an embassy would not be considered an extreme act of war by any nation anywhere on earth.
MSNBC on Twitter: "In response to a reporter asking President Joe Biden what his message to Iran is in this moment, Biden responded "Don't.""We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed," Biden said. pic.twitter.com/zfPkl4i71g / Twitter"
In response to a reporter asking President Joe Biden what his message to Iran is in this moment, Biden responded "Don't.""We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed," Biden said. pic.twitter.com/zfPkl4i71g
They’ve seriously just been talking about it as though the embassy strike didn’t happen, babbling about defending Israel and Israel’s right to defend itself like any attack by Iran would be coming completely out of the blue. On Friday President Biden warned Iran not to attack Israel when questioned about the coming strike, saying, “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed.”
“The threats from Iran are completely unacceptable and we, like the Americans, fully support Israel’s right to defend itself,” said British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Thursday.
“Australia is deeply concerned by indications Iran is preparing military action against Israel,” chimed in Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, saying Iran should “use its influence in the region to promote stability, not contribute to escalation.”
“Israel is under threat of imminent attack by Iran,” said US Senator Tom Cotton on Twitter. “President Biden needs to warn the ayatollahs immediately that the United States will back Israel to the hilt and the joint American-Israeli retaliation for any attack will be swift and devastating.”
“Iran will bear the consequences for choosing to escalate the situation any further,” IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said following the cargo ship seizure.
Alan MacLeod on Twitter: "You'd never guess from this biased headline that Israel just bombed Iran's embassy. https://t.co/lxKiQ5kWhQ / Twitter"
You'd never guess from this biased headline that Israel just bombed Iran's embassy. https://t.co/lxKiQ5kWhQ
Mass media headlines have also been framing this as an attack that’s coming completely out of nowhere by an irrational aggressor.
“Netanyahu meets top officials as fear of Iran attack on Israel grows,” reads a headline from the BBC.
“Israel braces amid fears of Iranian strike; U.S. shifts forces to region,” a headline from The Washington Post says.
“Israel Bracing for Unprecedented Direct Iran Attack in Days,” blares Bloomberg.
“Major Iranian attack on Israel believed to be imminent,” warns CBS News.
The casual news consumer would see all this and assume that Israel and its allies have received some intelligence that Iran is preparing an attack without provocation, and are doing everything they can to deter this maniacal regime from doing so.
This is ridiculous. If Iran had bombed a US embassy and killed multiple US military officials, the US would be raining bombs on Tehran within hours and everyone knows it. But Israel bombs an Iranian embassy and everyone acts like it didn’t happen and starts yelling at Iran instead.
It’s like if someone ran up and sucker-punched somebody at the bar, and then everyone started screaming at the guy who just got punched that he’d better leave the other guy alone and stop being a bully.
Iran is probably going to attack Israel, because at some point it does have to push back on Israeli violence to create some deterrence. Hopefully it will indeed be limited, hopefully the violence will not spiral into something nightmarish, and hopefully enough people are able to see through all the propaganda spin enough to understand what’s actually happening.
________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Featured image via Rawpixel.
Israel Lets Some Aid Into Gaza So The US Will Keep Giving It Weapons To Kill People In Gaza
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/296b28eef2d42cb45abfa945fbba4093/href
Israel has generously and compassionately reopened the Erez crossing to allow aid into Gaza, as it is the only way to ensure that the US will keep sending them weapons to kill the people in Gaza.
Biden sent Netanyahu one warning about a failure to protect civilians possibly costing Israel its US support and the crossing opened immediately, which proves (A) that Israel has been intentionally starving Gazans by closing entrances off from aid and (B) that Biden could have ordered this to stop at any time.
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The Biden administration approved another weapons package for Israel on the same day Israel killed a bunch of international aid workers in Gaza and bombed the Iranian consulate in Syria. But please, tell me more about how frustrated and angry and outraged and upset Biden’s feelings are feeling toward Israel.
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The huge amount of western outrage and sympathy we’re seeing over the IDF assassination of an international aid convoy compared to the systematic extermination of Palestinians we’ve seen over the last six months confirms the west only regards white people as full human beings, which is a point we’d already seen driven home by the disproportionate amount of outrage and sympathy we saw over Ukraine.
But you know what? We’ll take it. Things are that desperate that if you can only support an end to the Gaza genocide if you see six westerners get killed, I say welcome aboard anyway. Hopefully this is the beginning of the formation of an actual conscience that’s worth a damn.
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The mass media are reporting that the preliminary IDF debrief into the killing of several World Central Kitchen employees in Gaza has found that the multiple strikes were not carried out with the intention of killing those workers, a report which if you ask me has big “CIA Says It Has Found No Link Between Itself and Crack Trade” energy.
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https://medium.com/media/1537a8e28d0693d5c30159861abf206d/href
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Haaretz has a new article out titled “At Singapore Airshow, the Gaza War Was a Selling Point for Israeli Weapon Manufacturers,” which is exactly what it sounds like. One of the ugliest things about this dystopia is that acts of mass military slaughter are always immensely profitable for a specific industry. They’re profitable in and of themselves, even before you add in things like land and resource grabs, just by helping to market and sell more weapons.
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Stop calling this a “war”. A war doesn’t involve conversations about whether or not a walled-in population should be allowed to have food, medicine and electricity. If you have that much control over a population, you can’t be at war with it. You’re just killing a bunch of prisoners.
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Biden and his cohorts aren’t mad at Netanyahu for committing a genocide, they’re mad at Netanyahu for not hiding a genocide.
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I’ve fucking had it with people who blindly regurgitate empire propaganda about Gaza. Fuck right off with your weaponized gullibility.
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The thing that’s so pathetic about the push to blame this whole mass atrocity on Netanyahu is that the people doing this aren’t even really going after Netanyahu. They’re not pushing to send him to The Hague and have him imprisoned for war crimes or bring about any meaningful consequences at all — they’re just saying we should feel negative feelings toward him for a bit like we did with Bush.
It’s always about feelings with the imperial spin campaign over Gaza. Biden’s feelings toward Netanyahu, Israeli feelings about October 7, the feelings of western Jews about pro-Palestine protests. The whole thing’s been one nonstop appeal to emotion fallacy.
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MAGA Republicans claim to be a bold anti-war, anti-establishment faction, which is squarely refuted by their support for the Gaza genocide.
Democrats claim to support human rights and to oppose tyranny and racism, which is squarely refuted by their support for the Gaza genocide.
________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Featured image via Adobe Stock.
How could Trump make the USA a fascist state?
I felt this worth sharing. I trust Robert Reich as a reliable source of opinion:
Imagine If Russia Or China Did The Things Israel Is Doing In Gaza
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/08f3cbbe9c77fa4892a1315d8be5e3ce/href
Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China was bombing and starving a walled-in population of two million, half of them children. Seriously, imagine it. Imagine the rage and vitriol. Imagine the nonstop media coverage.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, US media coverage of that war exceeded the media coverage of all US wars in the previous three decades. If Russia were deliberately and systematically exterminating civilians in Ukraine or anywhere else, the western media coverage of those war crimes would be many times more.
It’s almost cliché at this point to say “imagine if Russia or China did this”, but such comparisons are important for retaining a sense of perspective on just how evil the western political-media class is being about Gaza right now. We’re seeing articles come out in the mass media about starvation in Gaza which never once even mention the word “Israel”. Do you think that would be happening if this were being perpetrated by a government which defies the western empire? Of course not.
Assal Rad on Twitter: "An entire Economist article on famine in Gaza doesn't say the word "Israel" once. Not even when describing damage to farmland and water facilities or severely restricted aid deliveries.Saying *who* is destroying the farmland and restricting aid seems like basic info to include. pic.twitter.com/Z6fBtmc0Bp / Twitter"
An entire Economist article on famine in Gaza doesn't say the word "Israel" once. Not even when describing damage to farmland and water facilities or severely restricted aid deliveries.Saying *who* is destroying the farmland and restricting aid seems like basic info to include. pic.twitter.com/Z6fBtmc0Bp
Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China was deliberately blockading food from an imprisoned population of millions of people.
Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China was relentlessly raining military explosives on densely packed urban areas known to be full of children.
Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China was deliberately and methodically ethnically cleansing an oppressed population for entirely racist reasons.
Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if evidence that Russia or China are committing horrific war crimes was surfacing on a daily basis.
Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China were getting caught in lie after lie after lie while carrying out such a mass atrocity.
Imagine how the western political-media class would be acting if Russia or China tried to present them with blatantly fabricated evidence of crimes committed by the targeted population in justification of their atrocities.
We’d be living in a different political and media landscape. If Russia or China was doing what Israel is doing, entire presidential campaigns would have been built around who would oppose it most aggressively. Every sanction and embargo in the book would have been slammed upon the perpetrating government. The western press would be falling all over themselves to expose every atrocity and every lie and blaring those expositions as feature stories on every platform for months, and showering one another with awards for doing so.
Assal Rad on Twitter: "StateSpox was asked about UN Special Rapporteur @FranceskAlbs's report on Gaza which said there's reasonable ground that the threshold for genocide has been met.Miller said they oppose mandate of this rapporteur, accused her of antisemitism and rejected allegations of genocide. pic.twitter.com/R7s79FjYCQ / Twitter"
StateSpox was asked about UN Special Rapporteur @FranceskAlbs's report on Gaza which said there's reasonable ground that the threshold for genocide has been met.Miller said they oppose mandate of this rapporteur, accused her of antisemitism and rejected allegations of genocide. pic.twitter.com/R7s79FjYCQ
Instead we get this. Government officials babbling nonstop about Israel’s “right” to “defend itself” and how this would all be over if Hamas didn’t keep fighting, while showering Israel with weapons to help it continue its atrocities. The mass media churning out a constant deluge of passive-language “Gazans are having trouble finding food for some reason” headlines and continuous reminders that this is all happening because of October 7, while repeating Israeli atrocity propaganda like it’s gospel truth. All viable US presidential candidates vowing their unconditional support for Israel while occasionally impotently finger-wagging at this or that aspect of Israel’s atrocities to avoid looking like complete psychopaths.
That contrast between how the western political-media class is acting toward the Gaza genocide and how we all know they’d be acting if an unaligned government was doing something similar is exactly why the US-centralized empire cannot be permitted to rule our world anymore. It pretends to stand for peace, justice, freedom and democracy, but in reality it just inflicts nonstop death and suffering upon human beings around the world and covers it up with propaganda spin from its servile mainstream press. It purports to uphold the “rules-based international order”, but all that means in practice is that it upholds an international order in which the US empire makes up the rules as it goes along and changes them as it pleases.
Humanity cannot allow itself to be abused and tyrannized by this murderous, hypocritical globe-spanning power structure any longer. A better world is possible, but we’re going to have to find a way to pry the talons of these monsters off the steering wheel first.
______________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation (CC BY 4.0 DEED)
