anticapitalist:

Visualizing Palestine: The palestinian hunger strikes

On day 26, “200+ Guantanamo detainees coerced to end strike,” they actually held them down and forced tubes down their throats

(via frombaghdadwithlove)

inothernews:

“Hey listen George, thanks for coming.  Could you do me a solid?  Would you mind telling your Republican friends that I finished fighting the wars you started and that yes, I’m still trying to undo the economic damage wrought by your dizzyingly daft dependence on tax breaks for the rich?  I know you don’t think Mitt Romney’s a real conservative anyway.  Oh also tell your dad he’s got some ridiculous socks.  Trust me on that.  Kthxbai.”

(Photo of President Obama shaking George W. Bush’s hand following a ceremony to unveil the former president’s official White House portrait by Reuters via the New York Post)

Barack Obama tried to break the peace deal George Bush had made with Iraq. He wanted keep up to 10,000-20,000 troops in that country. The Iraqi PM fought him on it, and won. He just signed a deal to keep a U.S. presence in Afghanistan until 2024. I’m sick of constantly repeating this.

anticapitalist:

The primary fear-mongering agenda item for the National Security and Surveillance State industry is now cyberwarfare. The Washington cadre of former military officials who seek topersonally profit by exploiting national security issues — represented by Adm. Michael McConnell and Gen. Michael Hayden — has been running around for several years shrilly warning that cyberwarfare is the greatest threat posed by Terrorists and other of America’s enemies (and, just coincidentally, they also argue that it’s urgent that the U.S. Government purchase wildly expensive cyber-security technology from their private-sector clients as well as seize greater control over the Internet to protect against the threat).

But — as is usually true when it comes to Washington warnings about the evils of Others — this is pure projection. The U.S. is the leading developer and perpetrator of cyberwarfare, not the leading target. The New York Times this morning has a long excerpt from a new book by its hawkish national security reporter David Sanger — the book is entitled “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power” — which reveals that President Obama personally oversaw the development, and ordered the deployment, of the world’s most sophisticated computer virus, unleashed (in cooperation with Israel) on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facility.

Like many of President Obama’s defining policies — the Wall Street bailout, the Detroit bailout, the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, military commissions, indefinite detention, etc. — this virus (code-named “Olympic Games”) was begun by President Bush. In fact:

Meeting with Mr. Obama in the White House days before his inauguration, Mr. Bush urged him to preserve two classified programs, Olympic Games and the drone program in Pakistan. Mr. Obama took Mr. Bush’s advice.

Rather than just “preserve” them, he has rapidly accelerated both. As Sanger writes, Obama’s order for “increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities” will go down in history as “America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons.” But it’s not merely the U.S.’s first use; it marks the world’s first-ever deployment for military purposes of a whole new category of highly destructive weapons:

Mr. Obama, according to participants in the many Situation Room meetings on Olympic Games, was acutely aware that with every attack he was pushing the United States into new territory, much as his predecessors had with the first use of atomic weapons in the 1940s, of intercontinental missiles in the 1950s and of drones in the past decade. He repeatedly expressed concerns that any American acknowledgment that it was using cyberweapons — even under the most careful and limited circumstances — could enable other countries, terrorists or hackers to justify their own attacks.

Isn’t it amazing how the U.S. is constantly the world’s first nation to use new, highly destructive weapons — at the same time that it bombs, invades, and kills more than any other country by far — and yet it still somehow gets its media to tell its citizenry that it is America’s Enemies who are the aggressors and the U.S. is simply a nation of peace seeking to defend itself.

Presidential candidate Rocky Anderson supports Bradley Manning

“I’d rather vote for something I want and not get it than vote for something I don’t want, and get it.” -Eugene Debs

America is under attack?

Even fanatics like al-Qaeda aren’t really aggressors. They’re fighting a defensive war, trying to force us out. The Western media never publish their demands because they are so reasonable. They basically come down to, “Go home and leave us alone. Pull your soldiers, your CIA agents, your missionaries, your corporations out of Muslim territory. If you do that, we’ll stop attacking you.” Nothing about destroying the West or forcing it to become Islamic. Just that the West should stay in the West.

If people knew this — knew how easy it would be to stop terrorism — they wouldn’t want to fight this war. That’s why the media ignore al-Qaeda’s demands. Western leaders don’t want people to see that the war’s real purpose isn’t to stop terrorism but to control the resources of this region. They actually want the terrorism because that gives them the excuse they need — the threat of an evil enemy.

(via anticapitalist)

President Barack Obama chose the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC as the site for a Memorial Day speech in which he sought to rehabilitate the Vietnam War.

The speech was timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the first time US forces were deployed in a major combat operation inside the country in 1962, and served to kick off what is projected as a 13-year-long commemoration of that war. The commemoration, mandated by the US Congress, is being orchestrated by the Defense Department.

The appearance dovetailed with the Obama campaign’s efforts to identify the Democratic president with the armed forces and militarism in order to outflank his Republican rival from the right. It served a deeper purpose, however. Exorcising the ghosts of Vietnam has been a burning objective of America’s ruling class for nearly four decades.

At the heart of Obama’s speech was the hoary and reactionary myth that the approximately 1.5 million troops who saw combat in Vietnam were treated as pariahs and excoriated as war criminals and “baby killers” by the broad sections of the population that opposed the war.

“You were often blamed for a war you didn’t start, when you should have been commended for serving your country with valor,” Obama told the crowd, which included a number of Vietnam veterans, assembled in front of the wall bearing the names of nearly 60,000 US troops killed in the war.

“You came home and sometimes were denigrated, when you should have been celebrated. It was a national shame, a disgrace that should have never happened. And that’s why here today we resolve that it will not happen again,” the president continued.

The “national shame” and “disgrace” that earned the United States the hatred of hundreds of millions of people around the world was the war itself, a genocidal enterprise that took the lives of some 4 million Vietnamese.

In a flight of rhetorical fancy, Obama insisted that America must “celebrate” key battles of Vietnam on a par with the Normandy invasion or the battle for Iwo Jima during World War II. Among the specific episodes he cited was “Rolling Thunder,” the 1965 to 1968 bombing campaign against North Vietnam that dropped 864,000 tons of high explosives on the impoverished former colonial country. It killed, according to the CIA’s undoubtedly conservative estimates, 90,000 Vietnamese, 72,000 of whom were civilians. This savage bombardment, which destroyed schools, hospitals and villages, was one of the many war crimes perpetrated by US imperialism in over a decade of war.

Obama’s narrative ignored the reality that large numbers of US troops in Vietnam opposed the war. Among those who returned, not a small number joined the massive demonstrations demanding the withdrawal of US troops. Deep-going dissension among the troops in Vietnam led to widespread incidents of “fragging” [grenade attacks] on overly zealous commanding officers and other acts of overt rebellion that hastened the war’s end, as Washington feared losing control of its own army.

The lie that the mistreatment of veterans was the fault of a misguided public, or more pointedly of the antiwar movement, serves to cover up the reality that the government itself was to blame. Having subjected troops sent into combat to horrific conditions, it received the hundreds of thousands who returned suffering physical and mental wounds with callous indifference and inadequate support.

Obama insisted that “because of the hard lessons of Vietnam” we “take care of our veterans better.” However, the principal lesson learned by the US ruling establishment was that a conscript army posed unacceptable dangers of popular democratic and antiwar sentiments seeping into America’s war machine. It therefore moved to an “all volunteer” military. Volunteer or conscript, however, both then and now, troops have been treated as cannon fodder and disposable commodities.

Among the indices of the supposedly “better” conditions for US military personnel returning from Iraq and Afghanistan is an unemployment rate last year of 12.1 percent, with the jobless rate of those recently returned at nearly 30 percent. Some 75,000 veterans are homeless on any given night, while 1.5 million live in poverty. An estimated 300,000 veterans of America’s two most recent wars are returning home with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) or traumatic brain injuries. On average, 18 veterans a day are taking their own lives.

Obama said the 50th anniversary commemorations he was inaugurating with his speech would give Washington “another chance to set the record straight” on Vietnam. “This is one more way we keep perfecting our Union—setting the record straight.”

On the contrary, Obama’s aim is to facilitate the falsification of history so as to whitewash the crimes of American imperialism.

The official campaign will not provide some new insight into the past or a more truthful account of the Vietnam War and its horrors. It will instead seek to exploit sympathy for veterans to exonerate the criminals in the White House, the CIA and the Pentagon responsible for slaughtering millions. For nearly 40 years, the US ruling class has sought to bury and sanitize a history that ties it to the worst war crimes since the fall of the Nazis.

It is also an attempt to shatter the deep-seated hostility to wars of aggression that was the key domestic legacy of US imperialism’s debacle in Vietnam. This has been an objective of US presidents from Richard Nixon on: to erase the memory of a US imperialist defeat under conditions of mass opposition and social struggles at home. It was George H.W. Bush who, at the end of the 1991 Gulf War, triumphantly proclaimed, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!”

The two wars launched in the aftermath of 9/11, however, proved such triumphalism to be unjustified. Hostility to both wars grew steadily, and today polls show popular opposition to the war in Afghanistan at 66 percent, just above the record high of 65 percent against the Vietnam War in 1971.

Toward the end of his remarks, Obama declared that “honoring Vietnam veterans” means “never forgetting the lessons of that war.”

What are those lessons? According to Obama, they are the need for “a clear mission,” a “sound strategy,” giving the military “the equipment they need to get the job done,” and the resolve that when sending troops to fight, “We will have their backs.”

These are the conclusion of a Democratic president who was swept into office largely on a wave of hostility to the wars begun by his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush. They suggest that had the US military been equipped with the proper mission, strategy and equipment—nuclear weapons?—it could have prevailed in Vietnam. There is the clear implication that the US defeat resulted from a “stab in the back” by an unworthy population and defeatist politicians—an echo of the infamous theory promoted by the Nazis after Germany’s defeat in World War I.

For decades, the Democratic Party has beat a cowardly retreat in the face of Republican accusations that its anti-war wing was responsible for the defeat in Vietnam. Obama, it appears, is determined to adopt the Republican indictment as his own.

Obama’s Memorial Day speech makes it clear once again that his administration is an instrument of Wall Street and the US military and intelligence apparatus. The deeply reactionary and dishonest speech must be taken as a warning. If America’s ruling establishment is determined to rehabilitate the Vietnam War it is because it wants to prepare public opinion for even bloodier wars and more horrific crimes.

abaldwin360:

mohandasgandhi:

theatlantic:

Video of the Day: An Illinois Lawmaker’s Epic Freak-Out

Speaking in the Illinois State House Tuesday, Mike Bost lost his marbles during a discussion of pension reform. Like Beale, the longtime Republican representative from a southern Illinois district was mad as hell and he wasn’t going to take it any more, unleashing an epic rant at Speaker Mike Madigan.

The top moments are undoubtedly early in the clip, when he tosses a bunch of papers in the air, then punches them on the way down; and when he shouts, “Let my people go!” But stay with it until the end for his excellent variation on the old rap-battle mic drop. Also worth noting: the faces on his colleagues around him, trying to maintain a sense of dignity, except the woman in the burgundy behind him who seems willing to indulge her amusement.

Did he throw his papers in the air and try to punch them?

I read that he freaked like this because he was given a 200 page bill and only 15 minutes to review it.

^This is true, I live in Springfield. He made an ass out of himself, but I can’t say this isn’t how I would act every single day if I was a representative.

A bombshell New York Times article shows how Barack Obama has stepped way beyond anything George Bush ever did, acting as judge, jury, and executioner of “combatants” whose identities are unknown. He has personally redefined the word “combatant” to mean any military-age male within a “strike zone.”  I don’t know how Obama supporters can look at themselves in the mirror. Glenn Greenwald’s take on this article here.

maozedongisnotcool:

New York, New York - By now, nearly everybody has been exposed to the phenomenon of Golden Dawn (Chrysi Avgi in Greek), the neo-Nazi organisation that received almost 7 per cent of the vote in the Greek elections of May 6.

After the initial shock, the question “How is this possible?” was followed by the legitimate worry: “Are Greeks becoming fascists?” Some commentators on various blogs (many of them from northern and western Europe) even left messages urging the Greek electorate to feel shame, the deeper the better, for this unsightly and frightening development.

But let’s set a few things straight. First of all, Golden Dawn, despite its recent claims, is indeed a neo-Nazi party. Their ideology, which they describe on their website as “Popular and Social Nationalism”, gives their precise coordinates within Nazi ideology.

So do the origins of their party, which was founded by Nikolaos Michaloliakos in 1985 under a direct order from the imprisoned leader of the Greek junta, George Papadopoulos. And so do their self-representation, language and tactics. The official publication of Golden Dawn runs articles praising the Nazis and often places photographs of Hitler, Himmler, and Nazi gatherings on its front cover. The members of the organisation have the same uneducated, invented, and highly idiosyncratic understanding of ancient Greece as the Nazis did.

And their tactics are virtually indistinguishable from Nazi terrorist tactics: they terrorise immigrants, leftists, and journalists; they beat and maul teachers and students; they have infiltrated athletic clubs and have introduced hooliganism to the Greek landscape; and they have assumed the role of vigilantes and protectors of the general public. Some of those attacks have been documented, and the Golden Dawn-affiliated perpetrators have gone on trial and been imprisoned.

The history of the organisation is inextricably connected to the history of Michaloliakos, whose first public intervention in 1976 was an attack on journalists who were covering the funeral of the junta torturer Evangelos Mallios, who had been executed by the urban guerrilla organisation 17 November. Arrested and briefly detained, Michaloliakos met the leaders of the military junta in jail. Two years after his release he engaged in a series of bombings of public places in Athens, for which he was indicted. Golden Dawn gained notoriety after 1991, when it started attacking the first Albanian immigrants and after some of its members participated in the Srebrenica massacre. The organisation registered as a political party in 1993 and first won political representation in 2010, when Michaloliakos was elected to the Athens City Council.

It is doubtful, however, whether the 21 Golden Dawn deputies will ever enter the Greek parliament (legally, that is). We now know that no coalition government can be formed (without a gross violation of the Constitution), which means that new elections will be held, probably on June 17. Yesterday’s polls showed that 76 per cent of the Greek electorate expects Golden Dawn to lose most of its vote, with a large number of those polled expressing doubts that it would even win the 3 per cent needed to enter parliament.

Two questions remain, however, regardless of whether Golden Dawn ever enters parliament. The first one is a question of democracy: namely, what sorts of legitimate steps are available to democratic polities when they face the development of a totalitarian, racist, exclusionary formulation that actively engages in violent acts that severely restrict the civil and human rights of others? I argue that when a state is faced not simply with ideas but with the materiality of actions, then the state is obligated to outlaw them and the media are obligated to report on them. In Greece this is a multiply complex issue, since what I suggest was used from the beginning of the 20th century as the groundwork upon which the elimination of the left took place, based on fabricated accusations.

A second question remains: Why would Greeks, who fought against totalitarianism in massive numbers and paid one of the heaviest tolls in Europe for their participation in the resistance against Nazi Germany, vote for this despicable, emetic, and deeply anti-political formation, even as a protest?

What we need to keep in mind is that this tolerance of violence in the public sphere, especially violence that is directed towards the unarmed and the unprotected, is the result of the state’s long-term suppression of dissent and the collaboration of the police forces with right-wing extremists whose violent tactics the police have used. This tolerance is evident even in mundane instances, such as when, in 1999, the ludicrous Gerasimos Yakoumatos, a deputy and member of the centre-right New Democracy party, wanting to show the Minister of Public Order that he “meant business”, walked into Parliament brandishing his (legally obtained) revolver as protest for his house having been burglarised by immigrants the previous evening. Not only was this tolerated, but he was not arrested and was not in any way reprimanded.

The Greek polity has always found itself in a tug-of-war. On one end, there is a wide, democratic, proceduralist, but largely powerless (and ultimately apathetic) body politic. On the other end, there is a small but powerful authoritarian class that constitutes the core of state structures. Decades of brutal suppression of dissent has relied upon various para-state and paramilitary organisations. Police brutality, hooliganism, and the deep-seated intimacy between fragments of the police force and Golden Dawn have made the organisation’s temporary surge possible.

There is no right, centre, or left distinction in this, if by left one means the nominally socialist PASOK party. All post-junta Greek governments have availed themselves of this intimate relationship, as all Greek governments, at least from the early years of the 20th century, have invested more energy and resources into producing a polity that relies on snitches and turncoats than in producing responsible, accountable, and democratically minded citizens. For example, in the summer of 2002, as the dismantling of 17 November was taking place, the Greek prime minister - clearly at the behest of the British and the American antiterrorist secret services - asked the citizens to report anyone who appeared to be suspicious and dangerous.

A month ago I wrote in the Anthropology Newsletter about the claim that under the current circumstances in Europe, in which the social welfare state is being eviscerated and the destitute are pitted against the poor, the distinction between right and left is no longer useful. I argue, however, that it is precisely now that the elision of such a distinction is pregnant with dangers that the world has faced before.

The neo-cons, the neo-fascists, and the neo-Nazis have been selectively appropriating leftist discourses and practices in order to obscure and obfuscate the distinctions between left and right. Michaloliakos, the coddled child of the junta, uses the term “junta” pejoratively (to indicate the totally inept but democratically elected Greek government, the press, and the memorandum), calls the actions of Golden Dawn “national resistance” when he instigates violence against immigrants and politicians, and has warned about an “uprising of the masses”.

Europe stands on the head of a needle, steeped in a crisis that threatens the foundational premises of democracy, self-determination, and autonomy. Golden Dawn is a European problem, not a limited and containable Greek one. It is a European problem because its ideology developed and flourished in Germany and Italy of the early 20th century. It is not a “natural”, essential, ontological property of Greece, and it is intractably connected to the moralistic and punitive positions that have organised the actions of the troika that put the bailout packages together.

When people are pushed to the brink, ugly things happen, and the troika (and particularly Merkel) ought never to forget the warning of George Santayana: “Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it”.

All emphases mine. It’s also important to remember that Greece has a long history of antifascist movements headed by communists against the behests of their various liberal-centrist states. The Civil War in Greece which was fought from 1946 to 1949 was between the Greek governmental army, backed by the United Kingdom and the United States, and the Democratic Army of Greece (ΔΣΕ) (Greek initials DSE), the military branch of the Greek Communist Party (KKE), backed by Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Albania. It was the result of a highly polarized struggle between communist and nationalist/royalist movements which started in 1943 and targeted the power vacuum that the German-Italian occupation during World War II had forged. The emphýlios (civil-war) has been periodized by the Right, by the British, and by U.S. historiography from the beginning: the First Round (1943), the Second Round (the Battle of Athens in 1944), the Third Round (1946–49), a gesture that left no doubt as to the specificity of its timing: when it started, when it ended, and how time was spent in between.

Such a periodization, however, does not take into account the schism that had divided the country with Dichasmós (when monarchists and republicans, trying to settle the question of the form of government, engendered a deep and enduring rift), the trauma of the Metaxas dictatorship, the handing of political prisoners over to the Germans by the successor to the Metaxas government in 1941, and the creation of the Security Battalions by the Germans and the collaborationist government of Rallis.

Nor does it account for the fact that the term post–civil war does not denote a temporality that sets apart the civil war from the rest of time, is not a terms of closure but an existential adjective, a term that has participated in the production of a political reality, the reality that did not end with the defeat on Vitsi but continued to exist until almost the junta of the 70s. And so it is not only a European—specifically German-Italian—problem; tracing the period after the German occupation shows Great Britain’s usual colonialist interventions played a role in that they aided U.S. foreign intervention throughout the Cold War to thwart communist insurgencies. And so the emphylios ended in 1949 and the left was forgotten. Only it resurged again to defeat the military junta of Papadopoulos in 1974 when various leftist parties gained legal entrance into parliament once again.

The left has been “defeated,” has “failed,” has been “catastrophic,” Western historiography tells us. But its periodicity fails to account for how Left discourse—whose nature has been obfuscated beyond recognition—starts to blare roughly every four decades; usually pivoting around a financial/economic crisis, and usually accompanied by an equally raucous fascist sentiment. Considering the history of Western-funded juntas in Greece, I’m really not surprised.

(via dibin)

EXTREMELY GRAPHIC footage of the aftermath of the Houla massacre that took place in Syria on Friday.

“For hours I heard the screams of women and children, and always gunshots”

Tanks and artillery fire killed a small number of the victims, but most were likely killed by government-linked militias known as the Shabiha. The Syrian government claims that al-Qaeda terrorist groups are responsible. 108 people were murdered, including 49 children. The incident has been described as a “tipping point,” while the United States, Australia, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Canada have announced that they are expelling Syrian diplomats.

thepoliticalnotebook:

Picture of the Day: Sana’a, Yemen. May 27. Protesters march in the capital city, demanding that former relatives of deposed President Ali Abdullah Saleh be removed from their senior posts in the army and the police force.

Credit: Khaled Abdullah/Reuters. Via.

View more Picture of the Day posts. Submit a photo.

americanfascism:

socialistictendencies:

crankycritic:

anticapitalist:

According to a diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks, U.S. troops willfully massacred an Iraqi family in the town of Ishaqi in 2006, handcuffing and then shooting 11 people in the head including a woman in her 70′s and five children ages five and under.

McClatchy is reporting that the soldiers then called in an air strike on the house to cover up evidence of the killings.

This account differs sharply from an official version of the 2006 incident, which indicated that coalition forces captured an al Qaeda in Iraq operative in the house, which was destroyed in a firefight. The WikiLeaks cable, however, corroborates accounts by Ishaqi townspeople and includes questions about the incident by Philip Alston, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.

The cable is dated twelve days after the incident, which took place March 15, 2006. In it, Alston says that autopsies performed in Tikrit on bodies pulled from the wreckage of the farmhouse indicated that all of the dead had been handcuffed and shot in the head.

If true, this action, although not as egregious as the My Lai massacre of March 16, 1968, wherein 347-504 unarmed civilians were shot to death by U.S. forces during the Vietnam conflict, still speaks volumes about war and the atrocities committed for war’s sake.

Read the original article (warning: graphic images)

Oh my God.

yawn

par for the fucking course

I’m not surprised. I do find it repulsive.

As shown through his stepped-up drone campaign, Barack Obama has become George W. Bush on steroids. - Foreign Policy

In simple words: While domestic policies remain a forum where disagreement is diverse and intense, the platform for foreign policies is where agreement is reached. Which also means candidates claiming to change the foreign policy won’t deliver much - similar to the case of Obama. Drones, bombing, covert ops, assassinations will continue to “protect US freedom.”

(via mehreenkasana)

I meant to post this earlier. Read it. And don’t apologize for this stuff with the old “but at least he’s not Romney!” garbage because somehow when the focus is on electing the favorite of two candidates, very important issues like those mentioned are swept under the rug. These issues can’t wait for some people.

(via mohandasgandhi)

(via mohandasgandhi)