by the way, here's a detail I enjoy sharing I got kicked off of Facebook. I believe for sharing these political cartoons. So to me, that's a merit badge.
Not sure where one goes off of facebook. My friends are scattered around the globe and that is the way we stay in touch. All social media could be deemed evil - China, Musk - every platform has an overlord.
Well, that's free market capitalism........but I left face book years ago......disturbed by some of what my nieces and nephews were posting...it seemed a kind of weird narcissism/voyeurism to me......not all the posts. But too many of them.
I use email to stay in touch with friends afar......or the telephone.
I completely understand that, but the only way to defeat the power of these corporations, and their control over us, is to stop using them. They are far too powerful to be brought into line by users and the government will surely not protect us. It’s really not worth it.
Forigive me if I am being pedantic, but I should add that, once you understand that we are ruled by sociopaths, then it also becomes evident what motivates them, and how they should be dealt with.
The US Empire is a massive, evil, criminal organization. Its blood is corporate money, its mind is the machinery of corruption and lies. It is a bureaucracy of death and torture, ruled by parasites and sociopaths. This is the truth, Not hyperbole. Our Empire is raw and ruthless, wearing a shining white cloak of false decency, lined in red. It feeds off of our fear and indifference, treating us like cattle. I AM NOT CATTLE. I AM A HUMAN BEING IN SOLIDARITY WITH PALESTINE, SUDAN, WITH ALL THOSE STRUGGLING AGAINST THE CRUEL WEAPONS OF EMPIRE! INCLUDING THE EARTH ITSELF!
Let's not forget Venezuela.....or any other country that dares to craft policies the USA thinks of as socialist. They're having a water crisis in Cuba now.....brought on I think, at least in part, by over 60 years of American sanctions.
Cuba doesn't threaten your fascistic state. Or does it? Your government sure seems content to starve the people of that little island, undo the gains the made when Castro kicked out the American puppet Batista, and win those cheap vacation sites back for your apolitical elites. Half a million Iraqi children 'were worth it' for Albright....their deaths served your gulag...and America barely blinked.......or watched the ten years of sanctions against Iraq after the first Gulf bloodbath.
What is it about American IDEOLOGY...that makes it so frightened of any kind of social solidarity???? Americans have been blinded in one eye for decades...
Gaza...and the growing belligerence of your Jewish proxy state....is perhaps an inevitable result of decades of interference around the globe. Neten yahoo can bomb whoever, wherever he chooses...Winken Blinken can jet set his sorry A...., to the Middle East until the region boils from climate warming........AMERICA'S FAVOURIT PROXY IS THE TAIL WAGGING THE AMERICAN DOG RIGHT NOW.........everyone on the planet can see that.........unless they're likewise blinded by American ideology.
I have to say, the shame of it has convinced me: IT SUCKS TO BE AMERICAN
Ooh. I remember the debate in Baltimore in 2020, early in the primary season. Bernie was on the stage with the other dems running for President. The people in the audience had paid around $3000 to be there, including the Progressive Black Caucus. He was speaking and said that Cuba had a better literacy rate than the US and he was booed! Booed for telling the truth?! What's wrong with us?
It sucks to be us? We're blinded and inured to other people's suffering. It's either that or rebel and let justified anger guide us. Underlying our obeisance to the authorities is a thick fear that this could be us next. The Stockholm Syndrome, maybe?
If Americans knew Cubans it would be very hard not to want to help them,, rather than cause unnecessary suffering for a people who are incredibly kind, funny, fun and willing to work hard.,
I sometimes think that what you fear, is precisely what you need more experience of. I'm so glad our daughter chose a Cuban boy and gave us three wonderful Cuban/Canadian grandchildren.
Mom and Dad took a holiday in Cuba, and she and her cousin came along. They both met Cuban boys, but only our daughter's marriage lasted...she worked two jobs for a year to bring him here....after they were married the last day of the 20th C......in Cuba.
When Covid first struck I remember reading about the Cuban Doctor brigade, going to other countries and helping out. Cuba exports doctors. We export weapons.
People in this country, during the travel ban, would travel to Cuba via Mexico, for the music. Cuban music is famous all over the world. I love it from afar. When I adopted my three dogs I swore that I'd never leave them with a sitter. My husband is welcome to travel on his own, but he doesn't. I visit my daughter in Portland occassionally. Some people might think that's crazy, but I wouldn't enjoy a vacation while worrying about my pooches.
“A tyrant needs above all a tyrant-state, so he will use a million little civil servant tyrants who each have a trivial task to perform, and each will perform that task competently, and without remorse, and no one will realize that he is the millionth link in the final act.” --- From: Henri Verneuil‘s film I Comme Icare --- Release date: Dec 19, 1979
We can go on and on.. blaming, name calling, tearing out our hair at the sight of a genocide, happening in front of our eyes. Inspite of all the state of Israel can do, banning reporters, shooting protesters, flooding social media with outright lies.........what the state of Israel has become, and what that state is willing to do...should be obvious by now.
Sixteen dead in Syria announced on our Canadian CBC this morning.......but only by the ticker tape going by as we discuss more pressing issues....like, should the NDP candidate running in a Montreal by election have posed in front of a Palestinian flag and announced his desire for an end to the bombing of Gaza??
Our little Trump imitator, Pierre Poileivre, and his Conservative party, will stand with Israel. No surprise, they also stand with the anti-vacc movement. Some people's liberty and freedom of speech is far more important that a little Middle Eastern genocide. How did those beliefs work their way into our precious democracy's and why are those beliefs accompanied by so much violence and finger pointing hatred of democracies...'other side'??
But for those of us who still have eyes to see......bad mouthing/calling right wingers 'evil' or 'sociopaths'...seems too simple a reaction. Far better a discussion of what it is about western capitalist democracies that led them to this unconditional support of blatant war crimes??? If committed by our side/or our allies??
We thought we opposed Nazi like thinking and acting in the democratic west. How has it come to be that we're on the same side as them..........content to watch a people being wholesale slaughtered.....while our tax dollars keeps going.......not to solve the drug crisis or the daily mass shootings that America produces......but to maintain the weapons of mass destruction arsenals of a little country we created after WWII.......to house the survivors of another genocide.
We're all caught in this web of false virtue, this ideological construct of western 'democracies'. HOW DID WE GET HERE??? IS THERE ANY HOPE OF ADMITTING HOW WRONG WE WERE AND OF CHARTING A NEW COURSE???
Or are we determined to let America's proxy wars finish us off.........before the Great Mother, in her infinite complexity and wisdom, can do so???
Perhaps we could think about our real situation........and waste no time on left/right accusations and counter accusations. Doesn't matter who's to blame. How are we going to work together to fix things???
Mr. Sacco exhibits the distilled insight and savage indignation of a great satirist of evil. As is shown by the many comments a couple of days ago on his next-to-last graphic commentary on Gaza, to view his graphic commentaries breaks your heart all over again after you have read the news. (It is easy to see why CH feels such an affinity with Mr. Sacco, since CH is also a great satirist of human evil, though in the genre of journalism.) The conclusion Mr. Sacco reaches at the end of his graphic commentary on Gaza is imaginatively absolutely accurate: “the only justice” the Palestinians “can count on will remain in the province of fiction.”
But two distinctions are essential to understand his conclusion properly. First, the province of fiction Mr. Sacco is referring to is satire, and satire is only one genre of fiction. It is the genre that addresses injustice and is, accordingly, implicitly based on an ideal goal of justice. But justice, together with its attendant punishment, can never be an ultimate ideal in itself. It is the opposite pole of mercy and love. From the perspective from satire, one wishes for justice. But from a larger imaginative perspective, one wishes not for justice and punishment, but the higher world of mercy and love.
Mr. Sacco’s last frame may easily be read as proceeding from the satirist’s imaginative desire for justice directly to the fundamentalist’s literal desire for punishment. While it is true that punishment is sometimes a practical necessity, the active desire to punish is the desire for revenge. And what is revenge? Revenge is the desire to inflict pain and harm on another human being. What is evil? To do evil is to inflict pain and harm on another human being. Thus revenge is humankind’s favorite, go-to rationalization for committing evil. And thus Israel’s leaders assert that it must “retaliate,” that is, take revenge, for October 7; and our government and mainstream media, with their own worldly morality, constantly repeat this statement, uncritically or approvingly. The assertion that retaliation, that is, revenge, is “necessary” is equivalent to the resolution Milton’s Satan makes after he finds himself in Hell: “Evil be thou my good.” Thus Israel has aggressively and publicly pledged itself to pure evil; and pure evil its what it is doing.
Where does our leaders’ lust for, and practice of, the evil of revenge leave us? It should certainly not lead us to want above all to take revenge against them and punish them for the evil they are doing, condemning them to eternal torment in Dante’s inferno. The vision Dante presents in the “Inferno” is Satan’s vision. To understand this vision literally, that is, as a fundamentalist would understand it, would be to adopt a satanic vision. To want to take revenge and punish the monsters of genocide would be to repeat their own evil, to make evil our own good. To do so would be to allow ourselves to be infected with the mass psychosis that leads the Israelis and their American counterparts to commit the monstrous crimes they are committing. The spread of mass psychosis through such mirror-imaging is the reason why human history is a record of bloodthirsty depravity. It is the basis of the unending cycle of paranoid revenge morality that humankind never tires of and cannot escape.
This mass psychosis, and the nihilistic cycle of revenge it generates, are responsible for the Israeli genocide in Gaza. The genocidal hatred of Palestinians that is endemic among Israeli Jews was cultivated by Zionists on the basis of the fear and hatred, and consequent desire for revenge, inspired by the Holocaust. This is the familiar phenomenon of the abused becoming the abuser. The son is abused by the father, and becomes the abuser of his own son. Jews were abused by the Germans, and, having descended into a Nazi-level mass psychosis, have become the abusers of the Palestinians. The Palestinians understand this perfectly well, and have repeatedly asked why they should be punished for the sins of the Germans.
The only possible remedy for this collective mental disease of humankind is love, compassion, and forgiveness. If we cannot make these our own ideals, as we suffer watching the Palestinians suffer (and watching Israeli Jews destroy themselves), then how can we expect anyone else to make them their ideals? Love can be realized and become effective in the world only if we use our full imaginative powers. In such hideous times as these, we begin with the power of satire, which arouses in us the recognition of the insanity and illusoriness of the world we live in. But we must proceed by seeking the powers of a larger imaginative vision, beyond the province of satire. Otherwise we can only succumb to despair. One would do well to read, or re-read, W. B. Yeats’s poem, “Lapis Lazuli,” in this regard, with its lines (in which the word “gay” is used in its older sense):
“All things fall and are built again, / And those that build them again are gay.”
"To do evil" is your extra layer of fantasy...and the fallacy of your armature psychoanalysis of current events. There is no such thing as "doing" evil. The concept of evil is simply religious dogma oozing from your apparent indoctrination. Inflicting "pain and harm" are terms that are wholly sufficient towards telling the story of this particular social psychosis.
The moral upstanding USA where the bottomless pit to hell resides. The USA is like a massive black hell hole where everything is sucked to die. And there is absolutely NOTHING LEFT in the USA that is considered too evil to engage in. Especially if it is profitable when it comes to amassing artificial wealth. With real wealth being a healthy ecosystem and a political system whereby everyone is actually considered equal at home and abroad. Adios Homo Sapiens, you were nothing but a failed species in the end and you destroyed most if not all life on earth along the way.
The former United States has been surrogate to British, Dutch, and Vatican banking interests since day one. The American revolution was a complete failure due to these attachments, and "educational" systems world wide have sold a fairy tale of lies.
Sugar and Spice and Everything Vice: the Empire’s Sin City of London >>> CYNTHIA CHUNG
The Gaza vicious "attacked and response" by Israel against Hamas, mimics the vicious 911 "attacked and response" of the U.S. against ME terrorism (and the creation of the $20 trillion Homeland Defense Department)...and the "attacked" part has never been sufficiently explained. That is, what kicked off these atrocities is unclear and motives of national hegemony emerge, IMO.
Celebrating the slaughter in Gaza while enjoying the "joy of politics" is unquestionably the farthest reach of really sick irony! The Democratic Party (talk about ironic) is fast catching up to the Maga people's deranged and obsessive hatred and cruelty.
Ingamarie commented above, “Let’s not forget Venezuela,” and mentioned Cuba as well. Many other commenters have suggested various causes and origins of the genocide in Gaza, including historical, ideological, and psychological ones.
However, a serious inquiry into the origins of America’s innumerable domestic and international crimes, and into the origins of the Israeli genocide in particular, would require a perspective larger than any of the limited perspectives that seem to be on offer here. A central point that mostly goes unmentioned, for example, is that the US was founded on exactly the same kind of settler-colonial genocide, ethnic cleansing, and land theft that Israel was. The limited nature of these perspectives is, of course, entirely understandable. The subject would require months, years, in fact a lifetime of study. Since none of us seems to be a professional historian, perhaps a more provisional and humble approach than some commenters seem to take might be advisable.
At the same time, it is necessary to bear in mind that one of the essential propaganda points of our imperial security-state war-machine is the perception that it needs to be run by a mysterious priesthood. Its priests are hierophants of sacred higher mysteries, mysteries that cannot be understood by ordinary people, mysteries that it would be dangerous for ordinary people to know or make decisions about. Only members of the White House staff, the State Department, the spy agencies, the Pentagon leadership, the Department of Energy (for nuclear weapons), the arms manufacturing industry, and so forth can be permitted to have knowledge of the Top Secrets on which our “national security,” our way or life, and our very lives, depend. Only this priesthood has the knowledge, experience, and wisdom to interpret and act in geopolitical affairs. Only after they have acted--for example, by declaring war, officially or unofficially, thereby condemning thousands or millions of our fellow human beings to death and their nations to despotic repression, can the people be instructed about the geopolitical and military conclusions our national security priesthood has reached in its transcendent wisdom.
Keeping this paradoxical situation in mind, Ellen—that we must be humble in our ignorance, but at the same time be able to recognize that the emperor has no clothes—I would like to offer a layperson’s thoughts about the war in Ukraine. I’m glad you raised the issue. The numbers of dead in Ukraine and Russia are generally comparable to those in Gaza and the West Bank, yet the war in Ukraine has almost disappeared from US consciousness. The shell game of US imperial aggression moves so fast, from Iraq to Syria to Libya to Afghanistan to Yemen to Ukraine to Gaza, it is hard to begin keeping up with it.
Making sense of the war in Ukraine begins with the collapse of the USSR. In 1990 President George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of State, James Baker, famously promised Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would be expanded “not one inch” eastward. A succession of other American and European diplomats repeated the promise over the following years.
Actually, there was no reason for NATO to continue even to exist after 1991. Its alleged mission is to defend the West against the USSR, which ceased to exist in 1991. If there were any honesty in the Washington imperial war machine, NATO would have then been dissolved, as was its Eastern counterpart, the Warsaw Pact. (NATO headquarters are notionally in Brussels, but its real headquarters are in Washington. Countries do not apply for membership in NATO to Brussels, they apply to Washington. Candidates to be Secretary General of NATO do not apply to Brussels, they fly to Washington for a job interview with the US president.) But NATO is not really a defensive organization. In the twenty-first century it has conducted bombing campaigns in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East; it currently conducts military operations in the Western Pacific, as part of the US military encirclement of China. “NATO” stands for “North Atlantic Treaty Organization”; the Western Pacific is five thousand miles from the North Atlantic. (Did they get lost?) The military aggression with which China is threatening the West is the usual paranoid fantasy necessary to the US imperial project. The US sails nuclear aircraft carriers through the Taiwan Straits in the interest of the Freedom of the Seas. (As we all know, if China sailed nuclear aircraft carrier between Cuba and Florida, President Biden would celebrate that as a splendid example of the Freedom of the Seas, and invite China to send its nuclear aircraft carriers to come back and visit often.) The US national-security priesthood has been teaching Americans to internalize militaristic hostility towards China with the simplest of all propaganda techniques—mere repetition of the fact that two plus two equals five till enough people believe it and no one can seriously question it. In reality, NATO, by far the most powerful military organization in world history, is the aggressive military alliance of US imperialism, or, more largely, of the nations of the North Atlantic that have been brutally and ruthlessly subjugating and despoiling the rest of the world for half a millennium. NATO's first purpose is to maintain control over the crown jewel of the US empire, Europe. As the first Secretary of NATO famously said, the purpose of NATO is to “keep the Soviets out, the Americans in, and the Germans down” (Germany being the most powerful nation in Europe). The US is Europe's suzereign overlord—it permits its European vassal states to determine their own domestic policies (as long as they are not too socialistic, though fascism is OK); but their foreign policy is dictated by the US. Thus when France refused to participate in George W. Bush’s criminal and disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq, it became a pariah state in US eyes, and it was necessary for the members to the US House of Representatives to start eating “freedom fries” instead of “French fries.” When Germany wished to normalize its commercial relations with Russia, in particular with regard to gas supplies, Biden publicly declared that to be totally unacceptable, guaranteed that the Nordstream pipelines would never go into operation, and the pipelines were soon mysteriously blown up. For some reason, this terrorist attack, the most significant one since 9-11, has never been seriously investigated and soon vanished from public consciousness. There are serious claims that it was blown up by Biden.
In order to begin to understand the war in Ukraine, one must read some of the statements made during four decades by knowledgeable people in government, the academic world, the military, and elsewhere, which flatly stated that NATO should never expand eastward. In 1997 George F. Kennan, the former ambassador to the USSR and the so-called “architect” of the West’s Cold War policies, said that NATO’s expansion eastward would be “the most fateful error of American foreign policy in the entire post-Cold War era.” It is easy to find many quotations by eminent and knowledgeable persons that say the same thing. In 2008, the reckless warmonger George W. Bush suggested expanding NATO eastward; Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany adamantly opposed his suggestion (and was still being compelled to defend her position in 2022). She said that Ukraine “was not a democratically consolidated country”; was strongly influenced by oligarchs; and was highly corrupt (as it still is—not to mention the neo-Nazis in its government and armed forces). Most importantly, Merkel said that Russia would regard Ukraine’s acceptance into NATO as “a declaration of war,” and that its acceptance would have led to war in 2008. Putin, she said, “would not just let” Ukrainian NATO membership “happen.” But the empire cannot live without war.
Beginning in the 1990s, a decade in which Western capitalists and politicians took advantage of Russia’s weakness to loot it and make it a kleptocracy, Russian leaders repeatedly asked the US to cooperate with them to form a peaceful alliance extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The West, meaning Washington, invariably and categorically refused. (Because an empire cannot function without enemies, our current major designated enemies being Russia, China, Iran, Yemen, North Korea, the Palestinian people, and antisemitic Americans who actively oppose the Israeli genocide.)
One also needs to look into the Minsk agreements of 2014-2015, which the West apparently used as a smokescreen to buy time to operationally integrate Ukraine into the NATO war machine. One must also look at the US participation in the 2014 coup that overthrew the democratically-elected president of Ukraine, who was unacceptable to the US because he was “pro-Russian.” (Thus Russia would be entitled to stage a coup overthrowing the democratically-elected government of Canada, because the Canadian government is “pro-American.”) At the time of the coup, the assistant secretary of state for European affairs, Victoria Nuland, was recorded discussing, with the US ambassador to Ukraine, who the US wanted to have installed as the next prime minister of Ukraine. In this call she also famously said, regarding which parties should make the new political arrangements in Ukraine, "f**k the EU.” Various European government officials condemned her remarks as being “unacceptable,” but the US State Department spokesperson (Jen Psaki) explained that Nuland’s remarks were merely harmless political gossip.
In the year or two preceding the invasion of Ukraine, Putin repeatedly asked Washington not to make Ukraine a member of NATO. Washington repeatedly and categorically refused. In late August 2021, Biden abandoned (and betrayed) our “allies” in Afghanistan, blaming the timing of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan on Trump. The bloody, chaotic scenes of the botched US withdrawal shocked the world, but Biden declared that the withdrawal had been a success. Afterwards the US arbitrarily and pointlessly froze billions of dollars in funds that belonged to Afghans, which resulted in the privation and starvation of a great many Afghans. The occupation had indeed been a success for the US war machine, having provided it with a big job-order and customers who enriched it with hundreds of billions of dollars, together with enabling the career development of many members of the national-security state priesthood. The regrettable but unavoidable collateral damage happened to be thousands of corpses, and a failed state at war with itself under a brutal, regressive regime of Islamic fundamentalists. But Afghanistan had served its purpose, as the site of another US proxy war, so it was time for the US war machine to move on, and make our nation more secure by starting a war in Ukraine. A couple of weeks later, in early September, Biden announced that the time had come to make Ukraine a member of NATO.
Putin made his last plea that Ukraine not be made a member of NATO a couple of weeks before he finally gave up and invaded it. According to the geopolitical strategy of our national security priesthood, no nation needs a “sphere of influence,” which is almost a medieval conception, so it would be immoral and strategically disastrous to allow Russia to include Ukraine, with which it shares a long common border, in its sphere of influence. But at the same time, it is necessary for the sake of US national security to have a sphere of influence that extends eight thousand miles across a vast ocean and a continent all the way to the border of Russia. One of the US plans for Ukraine as a NATO member is to install nuclear missiles near the Russian border, within ten minutes of Moscow. Never mind the fact that in 1962 John Kennedy was ready to start WWIII in order to get Soviet missiles out of Cuba. How did the US warmongers expect Putin to react? After all, they had only been working since the 1990s to provoke Russia into the military response that nearly every informed person said it would take in response to Ukrainian membership in NATO. Therefore, as you may remember, every sock puppet in the US government mainstream media invariably and incessantly repeated the phrase, “Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.” “Unprovoked” was the imperial war-machine's 2022 word of the year. The truth must be replaced by a Big Lie in plain sight.
A month after Russia invaded Ukraine, a pair of third-party countries had almost arranged a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine. Therefore President Biden sent Prime Minister Boris Johnson of the UK to Kyiv to sabotage the peace negotiations, which he successfully did. Both Biden and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that one of the major reasons for supporting the US participation in the war in Ukraine is that most of those countless billions of dollars are actually coming back to the US,—that is, they are coming back to Daddy Warbucks and the careerists in the imperial war-machine. The dragon who makes the land a desolate waste must be fed a diet of beautiful young virgins.
The US resolve, that we will fight in Ukraine for “as long as it takes,” is another version of Netanyahu’s assertion that he will worry later about “the day after” the genocide, because he must first “defeat Hamas.” These statements are childish stalling devices whose real meaning is that the dragon must be fed until it is time for the next victim. In the case of the US, the next victim may be China. In the case of Israel, the next victims will be any Palestinians who survive the current genocide.
In the meantime, Biden has been playing an insane game of nuclear chicken with Putin, continually crossing Putin’s red lines to see how far he can make Russia submit in abject impotence to the omnipotence of the US empire. In June, Biden said, “I run the world.” He’s just trying to get Putin to agree to this commonsense statement. After all, he finished one war “successfully" in Afghanistan; quickly started another in Ukraine; and is actively participating in a genocidal proxy “war” in Gaza by supplying the ordinance, surveillance, and diplomatic and military protection without which it could not be conducted. Not every megalomaniacal, murderous, nihilistic leader in the world lives outside the US.
I am not a professional historian; obviously I do not have research assistants, or the time or background to conduct thorough research. Therefore I do not claim that every detail in this account is correct, though I have done my best to be accurate. It is my belief, however, that interpretively the account is substantially accurate.
I too am a out of the loop ''Joe 3 Pack''. But I was gifted with my share of common sense. When the USSR broke up, instead of giving the Russians a hand up, we threw them an anchor. President Lincoln said, in so many words, ''the best way to destroy your enemies, is to make them your friends. Instead of dissolving NATO, we expanded it. Knowing full well Putin will be forced to act as President Kennedy did in 1962. The Palestinians are labeled the ''terrorist''. Common sense tell me, how can they be the terrorists if they are doing all the dying? Common sense tells me, how can the Palestinians be the terrorists is every second of every day their land gets stolen from under their feet? Common sense tells me, the Palestinians are picking up the tab for what the Germans did in ''EUROPE'' .
by the way, here's a detail I enjoy sharing I got kicked off of Facebook. I believe for sharing these political cartoons. So to me, that's a merit badge.
when your bank accounts are frozen, that's probably when you've earned the rank of eagle
That's funny ( and true).
We should all leave Face Book.......not wait to be 'kicked off' for posting something real.
Not sure where one goes off of facebook. My friends are scattered around the globe and that is the way we stay in touch. All social media could be deemed evil - China, Musk - every platform has an overlord.
Well, that's free market capitalism........but I left face book years ago......disturbed by some of what my nieces and nephews were posting...it seemed a kind of weird narcissism/voyeurism to me......not all the posts. But too many of them.
I use email to stay in touch with friends afar......or the telephone.
I completely understand that, but the only way to defeat the power of these corporations, and their control over us, is to stop using them. They are far too powerful to be brought into line by users and the government will surely not protect us. It’s really not worth it.
Get people's email addresses or text numbers?
learning X.
I got kicked off FB for allegedly being a "Russian". I am not Russian, not even a Russian Blue.
Rather than do the honorable thing and re-register under another name, I said "good riddance" and have not returned.
FB did you a favor in "kicking" you off their surveillance site. I question why you (or anyone) would have wanted to be on it in the first place.
You are honoured!
Thank you Joe, I can’t imagine getting through this dark time without you, and Chis, to show us that, although we walk this inferno, we are not alone.
Once you understand that we are ruled by sociopaths, everything they do in Gaza makes sense from that perspective.
Forigive me if I am being pedantic, but I should add that, once you understand that we are ruled by sociopaths, then it also becomes evident what motivates them, and how they should be dealt with.
The US Empire is a massive, evil, criminal organization. Its blood is corporate money, its mind is the machinery of corruption and lies. It is a bureaucracy of death and torture, ruled by parasites and sociopaths. This is the truth, Not hyperbole. Our Empire is raw and ruthless, wearing a shining white cloak of false decency, lined in red. It feeds off of our fear and indifference, treating us like cattle. I AM NOT CATTLE. I AM A HUMAN BEING IN SOLIDARITY WITH PALESTINE, SUDAN, WITH ALL THOSE STRUGGLING AGAINST THE CRUEL WEAPONS OF EMPIRE! INCLUDING THE EARTH ITSELF!
Let's not forget Venezuela.....or any other country that dares to craft policies the USA thinks of as socialist. They're having a water crisis in Cuba now.....brought on I think, at least in part, by over 60 years of American sanctions.
Cuba doesn't threaten your fascistic state. Or does it? Your government sure seems content to starve the people of that little island, undo the gains the made when Castro kicked out the American puppet Batista, and win those cheap vacation sites back for your apolitical elites. Half a million Iraqi children 'were worth it' for Albright....their deaths served your gulag...and America barely blinked.......or watched the ten years of sanctions against Iraq after the first Gulf bloodbath.
What is it about American IDEOLOGY...that makes it so frightened of any kind of social solidarity???? Americans have been blinded in one eye for decades...
Gaza...and the growing belligerence of your Jewish proxy state....is perhaps an inevitable result of decades of interference around the globe. Neten yahoo can bomb whoever, wherever he chooses...Winken Blinken can jet set his sorry A...., to the Middle East until the region boils from climate warming........AMERICA'S FAVOURIT PROXY IS THE TAIL WAGGING THE AMERICAN DOG RIGHT NOW.........everyone on the planet can see that.........unless they're likewise blinded by American ideology.
I have to say, the shame of it has convinced me: IT SUCKS TO BE AMERICAN
Ooh. I remember the debate in Baltimore in 2020, early in the primary season. Bernie was on the stage with the other dems running for President. The people in the audience had paid around $3000 to be there, including the Progressive Black Caucus. He was speaking and said that Cuba had a better literacy rate than the US and he was booed! Booed for telling the truth?! What's wrong with us?
It sucks to be us? We're blinded and inured to other people's suffering. It's either that or rebel and let justified anger guide us. Underlying our obeisance to the authorities is a thick fear that this could be us next. The Stockholm Syndrome, maybe?
If Americans knew Cubans it would be very hard not to want to help them,, rather than cause unnecessary suffering for a people who are incredibly kind, funny, fun and willing to work hard.,
I sometimes think that what you fear, is precisely what you need more experience of. I'm so glad our daughter chose a Cuban boy and gave us three wonderful Cuban/Canadian grandchildren.
I hope you don't mind my asking, but how did your daughter meet her Cuban husband-to-be? (Asking for a friend!)
Mom and Dad took a holiday in Cuba, and she and her cousin came along. They both met Cuban boys, but only our daughter's marriage lasted...she worked two jobs for a year to bring him here....after they were married the last day of the 20th C......in Cuba.
Sweet! And very romantic!
When Covid first struck I remember reading about the Cuban Doctor brigade, going to other countries and helping out. Cuba exports doctors. We export weapons.
People in this country, during the travel ban, would travel to Cuba via Mexico, for the music. Cuban music is famous all over the world. I love it from afar. When I adopted my three dogs I swore that I'd never leave them with a sitter. My husband is welcome to travel on his own, but he doesn't. I visit my daughter in Portland occassionally. Some people might think that's crazy, but I wouldn't enjoy a vacation while worrying about my pooches.
Congratulations on the grandchildren! How lovely!
“A tyrant needs above all a tyrant-state, so he will use a million little civil servant tyrants who each have a trivial task to perform, and each will perform that task competently, and without remorse, and no one will realize that he is the millionth link in the final act.” --- From: Henri Verneuil‘s film I Comme Icare --- Release date: Dec 19, 1979
Join bereaved Israeli and Palestinian peacemakers in NYC and Boston, September 15-26!
www.parentscirclefriends.org/september2024
This tour will be the launch of our new peace education program, Listening from the Heart:
www.parentscirclefriends.org/listening
and the real message is in the details. thank you Chris and Joe
Problem is the genocide continues. so who will stop them?
We can go on and on.. blaming, name calling, tearing out our hair at the sight of a genocide, happening in front of our eyes. Inspite of all the state of Israel can do, banning reporters, shooting protesters, flooding social media with outright lies.........what the state of Israel has become, and what that state is willing to do...should be obvious by now.
Sixteen dead in Syria announced on our Canadian CBC this morning.......but only by the ticker tape going by as we discuss more pressing issues....like, should the NDP candidate running in a Montreal by election have posed in front of a Palestinian flag and announced his desire for an end to the bombing of Gaza??
Our little Trump imitator, Pierre Poileivre, and his Conservative party, will stand with Israel. No surprise, they also stand with the anti-vacc movement. Some people's liberty and freedom of speech is far more important that a little Middle Eastern genocide. How did those beliefs work their way into our precious democracy's and why are those beliefs accompanied by so much violence and finger pointing hatred of democracies...'other side'??
But for those of us who still have eyes to see......bad mouthing/calling right wingers 'evil' or 'sociopaths'...seems too simple a reaction. Far better a discussion of what it is about western capitalist democracies that led them to this unconditional support of blatant war crimes??? If committed by our side/or our allies??
We thought we opposed Nazi like thinking and acting in the democratic west. How has it come to be that we're on the same side as them..........content to watch a people being wholesale slaughtered.....while our tax dollars keeps going.......not to solve the drug crisis or the daily mass shootings that America produces......but to maintain the weapons of mass destruction arsenals of a little country we created after WWII.......to house the survivors of another genocide.
We're all caught in this web of false virtue, this ideological construct of western 'democracies'. HOW DID WE GET HERE??? IS THERE ANY HOPE OF ADMITTING HOW WRONG WE WERE AND OF CHARTING A NEW COURSE???
Or are we determined to let America's proxy wars finish us off.........before the Great Mother, in her infinite complexity and wisdom, can do so???
Perhaps we could think about our real situation........and waste no time on left/right accusations and counter accusations. Doesn't matter who's to blame. How are we going to work together to fix things???
Mr. Sacco exhibits the distilled insight and savage indignation of a great satirist of evil. As is shown by the many comments a couple of days ago on his next-to-last graphic commentary on Gaza, to view his graphic commentaries breaks your heart all over again after you have read the news. (It is easy to see why CH feels such an affinity with Mr. Sacco, since CH is also a great satirist of human evil, though in the genre of journalism.) The conclusion Mr. Sacco reaches at the end of his graphic commentary on Gaza is imaginatively absolutely accurate: “the only justice” the Palestinians “can count on will remain in the province of fiction.”
But two distinctions are essential to understand his conclusion properly. First, the province of fiction Mr. Sacco is referring to is satire, and satire is only one genre of fiction. It is the genre that addresses injustice and is, accordingly, implicitly based on an ideal goal of justice. But justice, together with its attendant punishment, can never be an ultimate ideal in itself. It is the opposite pole of mercy and love. From the perspective from satire, one wishes for justice. But from a larger imaginative perspective, one wishes not for justice and punishment, but the higher world of mercy and love.
Mr. Sacco’s last frame may easily be read as proceeding from the satirist’s imaginative desire for justice directly to the fundamentalist’s literal desire for punishment. While it is true that punishment is sometimes a practical necessity, the active desire to punish is the desire for revenge. And what is revenge? Revenge is the desire to inflict pain and harm on another human being. What is evil? To do evil is to inflict pain and harm on another human being. Thus revenge is humankind’s favorite, go-to rationalization for committing evil. And thus Israel’s leaders assert that it must “retaliate,” that is, take revenge, for October 7; and our government and mainstream media, with their own worldly morality, constantly repeat this statement, uncritically or approvingly. The assertion that retaliation, that is, revenge, is “necessary” is equivalent to the resolution Milton’s Satan makes after he finds himself in Hell: “Evil be thou my good.” Thus Israel has aggressively and publicly pledged itself to pure evil; and pure evil its what it is doing.
Where does our leaders’ lust for, and practice of, the evil of revenge leave us? It should certainly not lead us to want above all to take revenge against them and punish them for the evil they are doing, condemning them to eternal torment in Dante’s inferno. The vision Dante presents in the “Inferno” is Satan’s vision. To understand this vision literally, that is, as a fundamentalist would understand it, would be to adopt a satanic vision. To want to take revenge and punish the monsters of genocide would be to repeat their own evil, to make evil our own good. To do so would be to allow ourselves to be infected with the mass psychosis that leads the Israelis and their American counterparts to commit the monstrous crimes they are committing. The spread of mass psychosis through such mirror-imaging is the reason why human history is a record of bloodthirsty depravity. It is the basis of the unending cycle of paranoid revenge morality that humankind never tires of and cannot escape.
This mass psychosis, and the nihilistic cycle of revenge it generates, are responsible for the Israeli genocide in Gaza. The genocidal hatred of Palestinians that is endemic among Israeli Jews was cultivated by Zionists on the basis of the fear and hatred, and consequent desire for revenge, inspired by the Holocaust. This is the familiar phenomenon of the abused becoming the abuser. The son is abused by the father, and becomes the abuser of his own son. Jews were abused by the Germans, and, having descended into a Nazi-level mass psychosis, have become the abusers of the Palestinians. The Palestinians understand this perfectly well, and have repeatedly asked why they should be punished for the sins of the Germans.
The only possible remedy for this collective mental disease of humankind is love, compassion, and forgiveness. If we cannot make these our own ideals, as we suffer watching the Palestinians suffer (and watching Israeli Jews destroy themselves), then how can we expect anyone else to make them their ideals? Love can be realized and become effective in the world only if we use our full imaginative powers. In such hideous times as these, we begin with the power of satire, which arouses in us the recognition of the insanity and illusoriness of the world we live in. But we must proceed by seeking the powers of a larger imaginative vision, beyond the province of satire. Otherwise we can only succumb to despair. One would do well to read, or re-read, W. B. Yeats’s poem, “Lapis Lazuli,” in this regard, with its lines (in which the word “gay” is used in its older sense):
“All things fall and are built again, / And those that build them again are gay.”
"To do evil" is your extra layer of fantasy...and the fallacy of your armature psychoanalysis of current events. There is no such thing as "doing" evil. The concept of evil is simply religious dogma oozing from your apparent indoctrination. Inflicting "pain and harm" are terms that are wholly sufficient towards telling the story of this particular social psychosis.
Lasciate ogni speranza, voi chi hanno la sfortuna d'essere cittadini degli Stati Uniti.
Teach-in Network educating for justice
https://teachinnetwork.org
I'm pretty sure the Devil filed a restraining order against these ass-hats decades ago...
The moral upstanding USA where the bottomless pit to hell resides. The USA is like a massive black hell hole where everything is sucked to die. And there is absolutely NOTHING LEFT in the USA that is considered too evil to engage in. Especially if it is profitable when it comes to amassing artificial wealth. With real wealth being a healthy ecosystem and a political system whereby everyone is actually considered equal at home and abroad. Adios Homo Sapiens, you were nothing but a failed species in the end and you destroyed most if not all life on earth along the way.
The former United States has been surrogate to British, Dutch, and Vatican banking interests since day one. The American revolution was a complete failure due to these attachments, and "educational" systems world wide have sold a fairy tale of lies.
Sugar and Spice and Everything Vice: the Empire’s Sin City of London >>> CYNTHIA CHUNG
September 14, 2023 >>> https://cynthiachung.substack.com/p/sugar-and-spice-and-everything-vice
The City of London >>> LARRY ROMANOFF >>> November 26, 2022 >>> https://www.unz.com/lromanoff/the-city-of-london/
The Black Nobility >>> FORBIDDEN.NEWS >>> MAY 08, 2024 >>> https://forbiddennews.substack.com/p/the-black-nobility
The Gaza vicious "attacked and response" by Israel against Hamas, mimics the vicious 911 "attacked and response" of the U.S. against ME terrorism (and the creation of the $20 trillion Homeland Defense Department)...and the "attacked" part has never been sufficiently explained. That is, what kicked off these atrocities is unclear and motives of national hegemony emerge, IMO.
My newest double-sided, ad-hoc, focus-group tested, and most popular demonstration/protest sign on this subject simply says:
FUCK ZIONISM
NUTANYAHU
TRUMP AND
END AIPAC
(Other side)
CRONY
CORPORATE
CAPITALISM
IS CANCER
Celebrating the slaughter in Gaza while enjoying the "joy of politics" is unquestionably the farthest reach of really sick irony! The Democratic Party (talk about ironic) is fast catching up to the Maga people's deranged and obsessive hatred and cruelty.
like to see more opinion on Ukraine War which threatens nuclear destruction
Part I
Ingamarie commented above, “Let’s not forget Venezuela,” and mentioned Cuba as well. Many other commenters have suggested various causes and origins of the genocide in Gaza, including historical, ideological, and psychological ones.
However, a serious inquiry into the origins of America’s innumerable domestic and international crimes, and into the origins of the Israeli genocide in particular, would require a perspective larger than any of the limited perspectives that seem to be on offer here. A central point that mostly goes unmentioned, for example, is that the US was founded on exactly the same kind of settler-colonial genocide, ethnic cleansing, and land theft that Israel was. The limited nature of these perspectives is, of course, entirely understandable. The subject would require months, years, in fact a lifetime of study. Since none of us seems to be a professional historian, perhaps a more provisional and humble approach than some commenters seem to take might be advisable.
At the same time, it is necessary to bear in mind that one of the essential propaganda points of our imperial security-state war-machine is the perception that it needs to be run by a mysterious priesthood. Its priests are hierophants of sacred higher mysteries, mysteries that cannot be understood by ordinary people, mysteries that it would be dangerous for ordinary people to know or make decisions about. Only members of the White House staff, the State Department, the spy agencies, the Pentagon leadership, the Department of Energy (for nuclear weapons), the arms manufacturing industry, and so forth can be permitted to have knowledge of the Top Secrets on which our “national security,” our way or life, and our very lives, depend. Only this priesthood has the knowledge, experience, and wisdom to interpret and act in geopolitical affairs. Only after they have acted--for example, by declaring war, officially or unofficially, thereby condemning thousands or millions of our fellow human beings to death and their nations to despotic repression, can the people be instructed about the geopolitical and military conclusions our national security priesthood has reached in its transcendent wisdom.
Keeping this paradoxical situation in mind, Ellen—that we must be humble in our ignorance, but at the same time be able to recognize that the emperor has no clothes—I would like to offer a layperson’s thoughts about the war in Ukraine. I’m glad you raised the issue. The numbers of dead in Ukraine and Russia are generally comparable to those in Gaza and the West Bank, yet the war in Ukraine has almost disappeared from US consciousness. The shell game of US imperial aggression moves so fast, from Iraq to Syria to Libya to Afghanistan to Yemen to Ukraine to Gaza, it is hard to begin keeping up with it.
Making sense of the war in Ukraine begins with the collapse of the USSR. In 1990 President George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of State, James Baker, famously promised Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would be expanded “not one inch” eastward. A succession of other American and European diplomats repeated the promise over the following years.
Actually, there was no reason for NATO to continue even to exist after 1991. Its alleged mission is to defend the West against the USSR, which ceased to exist in 1991. If there were any honesty in the Washington imperial war machine, NATO would have then been dissolved, as was its Eastern counterpart, the Warsaw Pact. (NATO headquarters are notionally in Brussels, but its real headquarters are in Washington. Countries do not apply for membership in NATO to Brussels, they apply to Washington. Candidates to be Secretary General of NATO do not apply to Brussels, they fly to Washington for a job interview with the US president.) But NATO is not really a defensive organization. In the twenty-first century it has conducted bombing campaigns in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East; it currently conducts military operations in the Western Pacific, as part of the US military encirclement of China. “NATO” stands for “North Atlantic Treaty Organization”; the Western Pacific is five thousand miles from the North Atlantic. (Did they get lost?) The military aggression with which China is threatening the West is the usual paranoid fantasy necessary to the US imperial project. The US sails nuclear aircraft carriers through the Taiwan Straits in the interest of the Freedom of the Seas. (As we all know, if China sailed nuclear aircraft carrier between Cuba and Florida, President Biden would celebrate that as a splendid example of the Freedom of the Seas, and invite China to send its nuclear aircraft carriers to come back and visit often.) The US national-security priesthood has been teaching Americans to internalize militaristic hostility towards China with the simplest of all propaganda techniques—mere repetition of the fact that two plus two equals five till enough people believe it and no one can seriously question it. In reality, NATO, by far the most powerful military organization in world history, is the aggressive military alliance of US imperialism, or, more largely, of the nations of the North Atlantic that have been brutally and ruthlessly subjugating and despoiling the rest of the world for half a millennium. NATO's first purpose is to maintain control over the crown jewel of the US empire, Europe. As the first Secretary of NATO famously said, the purpose of NATO is to “keep the Soviets out, the Americans in, and the Germans down” (Germany being the most powerful nation in Europe). The US is Europe's suzereign overlord—it permits its European vassal states to determine their own domestic policies (as long as they are not too socialistic, though fascism is OK); but their foreign policy is dictated by the US. Thus when France refused to participate in George W. Bush’s criminal and disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq, it became a pariah state in US eyes, and it was necessary for the members to the US House of Representatives to start eating “freedom fries” instead of “French fries.” When Germany wished to normalize its commercial relations with Russia, in particular with regard to gas supplies, Biden publicly declared that to be totally unacceptable, guaranteed that the Nordstream pipelines would never go into operation, and the pipelines were soon mysteriously blown up. For some reason, this terrorist attack, the most significant one since 9-11, has never been seriously investigated and soon vanished from public consciousness. There are serious claims that it was blown up by Biden.
Part II
In order to begin to understand the war in Ukraine, one must read some of the statements made during four decades by knowledgeable people in government, the academic world, the military, and elsewhere, which flatly stated that NATO should never expand eastward. In 1997 George F. Kennan, the former ambassador to the USSR and the so-called “architect” of the West’s Cold War policies, said that NATO’s expansion eastward would be “the most fateful error of American foreign policy in the entire post-Cold War era.” It is easy to find many quotations by eminent and knowledgeable persons that say the same thing. In 2008, the reckless warmonger George W. Bush suggested expanding NATO eastward; Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany adamantly opposed his suggestion (and was still being compelled to defend her position in 2022). She said that Ukraine “was not a democratically consolidated country”; was strongly influenced by oligarchs; and was highly corrupt (as it still is—not to mention the neo-Nazis in its government and armed forces). Most importantly, Merkel said that Russia would regard Ukraine’s acceptance into NATO as “a declaration of war,” and that its acceptance would have led to war in 2008. Putin, she said, “would not just let” Ukrainian NATO membership “happen.” But the empire cannot live without war.
Beginning in the 1990s, a decade in which Western capitalists and politicians took advantage of Russia’s weakness to loot it and make it a kleptocracy, Russian leaders repeatedly asked the US to cooperate with them to form a peaceful alliance extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The West, meaning Washington, invariably and categorically refused. (Because an empire cannot function without enemies, our current major designated enemies being Russia, China, Iran, Yemen, North Korea, the Palestinian people, and antisemitic Americans who actively oppose the Israeli genocide.)
One also needs to look into the Minsk agreements of 2014-2015, which the West apparently used as a smokescreen to buy time to operationally integrate Ukraine into the NATO war machine. One must also look at the US participation in the 2014 coup that overthrew the democratically-elected president of Ukraine, who was unacceptable to the US because he was “pro-Russian.” (Thus Russia would be entitled to stage a coup overthrowing the democratically-elected government of Canada, because the Canadian government is “pro-American.”) At the time of the coup, the assistant secretary of state for European affairs, Victoria Nuland, was recorded discussing, with the US ambassador to Ukraine, who the US wanted to have installed as the next prime minister of Ukraine. In this call she also famously said, regarding which parties should make the new political arrangements in Ukraine, "f**k the EU.” Various European government officials condemned her remarks as being “unacceptable,” but the US State Department spokesperson (Jen Psaki) explained that Nuland’s remarks were merely harmless political gossip.
In the year or two preceding the invasion of Ukraine, Putin repeatedly asked Washington not to make Ukraine a member of NATO. Washington repeatedly and categorically refused. In late August 2021, Biden abandoned (and betrayed) our “allies” in Afghanistan, blaming the timing of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan on Trump. The bloody, chaotic scenes of the botched US withdrawal shocked the world, but Biden declared that the withdrawal had been a success. Afterwards the US arbitrarily and pointlessly froze billions of dollars in funds that belonged to Afghans, which resulted in the privation and starvation of a great many Afghans. The occupation had indeed been a success for the US war machine, having provided it with a big job-order and customers who enriched it with hundreds of billions of dollars, together with enabling the career development of many members of the national-security state priesthood. The regrettable but unavoidable collateral damage happened to be thousands of corpses, and a failed state at war with itself under a brutal, regressive regime of Islamic fundamentalists. But Afghanistan had served its purpose, as the site of another US proxy war, so it was time for the US war machine to move on, and make our nation more secure by starting a war in Ukraine. A couple of weeks later, in early September, Biden announced that the time had come to make Ukraine a member of NATO.
Part III
Putin made his last plea that Ukraine not be made a member of NATO a couple of weeks before he finally gave up and invaded it. According to the geopolitical strategy of our national security priesthood, no nation needs a “sphere of influence,” which is almost a medieval conception, so it would be immoral and strategically disastrous to allow Russia to include Ukraine, with which it shares a long common border, in its sphere of influence. But at the same time, it is necessary for the sake of US national security to have a sphere of influence that extends eight thousand miles across a vast ocean and a continent all the way to the border of Russia. One of the US plans for Ukraine as a NATO member is to install nuclear missiles near the Russian border, within ten minutes of Moscow. Never mind the fact that in 1962 John Kennedy was ready to start WWIII in order to get Soviet missiles out of Cuba. How did the US warmongers expect Putin to react? After all, they had only been working since the 1990s to provoke Russia into the military response that nearly every informed person said it would take in response to Ukrainian membership in NATO. Therefore, as you may remember, every sock puppet in the US government mainstream media invariably and incessantly repeated the phrase, “Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.” “Unprovoked” was the imperial war-machine's 2022 word of the year. The truth must be replaced by a Big Lie in plain sight.
A month after Russia invaded Ukraine, a pair of third-party countries had almost arranged a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine. Therefore President Biden sent Prime Minister Boris Johnson of the UK to Kyiv to sabotage the peace negotiations, which he successfully did. Both Biden and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said that one of the major reasons for supporting the US participation in the war in Ukraine is that most of those countless billions of dollars are actually coming back to the US,—that is, they are coming back to Daddy Warbucks and the careerists in the imperial war-machine. The dragon who makes the land a desolate waste must be fed a diet of beautiful young virgins.
The US resolve, that we will fight in Ukraine for “as long as it takes,” is another version of Netanyahu’s assertion that he will worry later about “the day after” the genocide, because he must first “defeat Hamas.” These statements are childish stalling devices whose real meaning is that the dragon must be fed until it is time for the next victim. In the case of the US, the next victim may be China. In the case of Israel, the next victims will be any Palestinians who survive the current genocide.
In the meantime, Biden has been playing an insane game of nuclear chicken with Putin, continually crossing Putin’s red lines to see how far he can make Russia submit in abject impotence to the omnipotence of the US empire. In June, Biden said, “I run the world.” He’s just trying to get Putin to agree to this commonsense statement. After all, he finished one war “successfully" in Afghanistan; quickly started another in Ukraine; and is actively participating in a genocidal proxy “war” in Gaza by supplying the ordinance, surveillance, and diplomatic and military protection without which it could not be conducted. Not every megalomaniacal, murderous, nihilistic leader in the world lives outside the US.
I am not a professional historian; obviously I do not have research assistants, or the time or background to conduct thorough research. Therefore I do not claim that every detail in this account is correct, though I have done my best to be accurate. It is my belief, however, that interpretively the account is substantially accurate.
I too am a out of the loop ''Joe 3 Pack''. But I was gifted with my share of common sense. When the USSR broke up, instead of giving the Russians a hand up, we threw them an anchor. President Lincoln said, in so many words, ''the best way to destroy your enemies, is to make them your friends. Instead of dissolving NATO, we expanded it. Knowing full well Putin will be forced to act as President Kennedy did in 1962. The Palestinians are labeled the ''terrorist''. Common sense tell me, how can they be the terrorists if they are doing all the dying? Common sense tells me, how can the Palestinians be the terrorists is every second of every day their land gets stolen from under their feet? Common sense tells me, the Palestinians are picking up the tab for what the Germans did in ''EUROPE'' .