The Israeli military guns down civilians in cold blood, including Americans and British. This documentary shows the evidence and what life is like for civilians in Gaza, Israeli occupied Palestine.
http://widgets.vodpod.com/w/video_embed/Groupvideo.2994587
18 July, 2009 — stopnato
The reunification of Germany and the start of NATO’s post-Cold War expansion, drive east and beginning of its transformation into a global military force occurred on the same day, October 3, 1990.
On that date East Germany was absorbed into the Federal Republic and simultaneously into NATO, the first of thirteen additions to the bloc from that time to the present year.
United since 1990 within its pre-1938 borders, Germany has cast aside most all post-Potsdam Agreement and Nuremberg Principles constraints and become a military power engaged in wars on the European and Asian continents (Yugoslavia in 1999, Afghanistan since 2001) and naval surveillance and interdiction operations in the Mediterranean Sea and the Gulf of Aden.
20 July 2009 — Youtube
A recording of the public lecture by Dmitry Orlov on 9 June 2009, at the Davenport Hotel, Dublin, Ireland.
This was the opening talk to the 3 day conference ‘The New Emergency: Managing Risk and Building Resilience in a Resource Constrained World.’
This conference was organised by Feasta, the Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability.
19 July, 2009 — Postcards from the Revolution
The talks are finished for now, with no resolution. The coup regime in Honduras, which ousted President Zelaya exactly 3 weeks ago, has rejected the 7-point proposal put forth by designated mediator Oscar Arias, president of Costa Rica. Zelaya’s delegation in Costa Rica had earlier stated they had accepted the proposal, but later said they accepted debating the proposal, and didn’t comment on whether or not they had unconditionally accepted all seven terms laid out by Arias.
The coup regime today introduced a counter-proposal, which would not have allowed for President Manuel Zelaya’s return to the presidency, but would have allowed his return to Honduras, to be tried and imprisoned for alleged constitutional violations. The coup regime and those participants in the June 28th coup d’etat that involved the violent kidnapping and forced exile of President Zelaya, have claimed that a coup did not take place, but rather a ‘rescue’ of the constitutional. They claim that President Zelaya was violating the constitution by proposing a non-binding national survey on the possibility of future constitutional reform. Most strange in this claim is that a non-binding survey, which means it doesn’t legally matter what the outcome is, to consult the people’s will regarding their constitution, is somehow a violent crime that justifies kidnapping, forced exile, and 3 weeks of imposed national curfew, suspension of constitutional rights and repression of the people. Who are the real criminals?
Media eulogies for Walter Cronkite — including from progressive commentators — rarely talk about his coverage of the Vietnam War before 1968. This obit omit is essential to the myth of Cronkite as a courageous truth-teller.
But facts are facts, and history is history — including what Cronkite actually did as TV’s most influential journalist during the first years of the Vietnam War. Despite all the posthumous praise for Cronkite’s February 1968 telecast that dubbed the war “a stalemate,” the facts of history show that the broadcast came only after Cronkite’s protracted support for the war.
In 1965, reporting from Vietnam, Cronkite dramatized the murderous war effort with enthusiasm. “B-57s — the British call them Canberra jets — we’re using them very effectively here in this war in Vietnam to dive-bomb the Vietcong in these jungles beyond Da Nang here,” he reported, standing in front of a plane. Cronkite then turned to a U.S. Air Force officer next to him and said: “Colonel, what’s our mission we’re about to embark on?”
“Well, our mission today, sir, is to report down to the site of the ambush 70 miles south of here and attempt to kill the VC,” the colonel replied.
Cronkite’s report continued from the air. “The colonel has just advised me that that is our target area right over there,” he said. “One, two, three, four, we dropped our bombs, and now a tremendous G-load as we pull out of that dive. Oh, I know something of what those astronauts must go through.”
Next, viewers saw Cronkite get off the plane and say: “Well, colonel, it’s a great way to go to war.”
The upbeat report didn’t mention civilians beneath the bombs.
That footage from CBS Evening News appears in “War Made Easy,” the documentary film based on my book of the same name. Routinely, audiences gasp as the media myth of Cronkite deconstructs itself in front of their eyes.
Also in 1965 — the pivotal year of escalation — Cronkite expressed explicit support for the Vietnam War. He lauded “the courageous decision that Communism’s advance must be stopped in Asia and that guerilla warfare as a means to a political end must be finally discouraged.”
Why does this matter now? Because citing Cronkite as an example of courageous reporting on a war is a dangerously low bar — as if reporting that a war can’t be won, after cheerleading it for years, is somehow the ultimate in journalistic quality and courage.
The biggest and most important lie about an aggressive war based on deception is not that the war can’t be won. The biggest and most important lie is deference to the conventional wisdom that insists the war must be fought in the first place and portrays it as a moral enterprise.
From the “War Made Easy” film transcript:
http://www.warmadeeasythemovie.org/downloads/full_transcript.pdf
NORMAN SOLOMON: “A big problem with the media focus is that it sees the war through the eyes of the Americans, through the eyes of the occupiers, rather than those who are bearing the brunt of the war in human terms.”
WALTER CRONKITE: “We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders both in Vietnam and Washington to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds.”
SOLOMON: “In early 1968, Walter Cronkite told CBS viewers that the war couldn’t be won.”
CRONKITE: “It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.”
SOLOMON: “And that was instantly, and through time even more so, heralded as the tide has turned. As Lyndon Johnson is reputed to have said when he saw Cronkite give that report, ‘I’ve lost middle America.’ And it was presented as not only a turning point, quite often, but also as sort of a moral statement by the journalistic establishment. Well, I would say yes and no. It was an acknowledgement that the United States, contrary to official Washington claims, was not winning the war in Vietnam, and could not win. But it was not a statement that the war was wrong. A problem there is that if the critique says this war is bad because it’s not winnable, then the response is, ‘Oh yeah, we’ll show you it can be winnable, or the next war will be winnable.’ So, that critique doesn’t challenge the prerogatives of military expansion, or aggression if you will, or empire.”
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Norman Solomon’s books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” which was adapted into a documentary film narrated by Sean Penn. For more information, go to: www.normansolomon.com
19 July, 2009
Many of the revolution’s promises remain unfulfilled? On July 19, 1979, the Sandinista revolution removed what many considered to be one of Latin America’s most brutal dictatorships. Thirty years later, and with the Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega once again in power, Al Jazeera’s Lucia Newman visited Nicaragua and found that many of the revolution’s promises have remained unfulfilled.
http://widgets.vodpod.com/w/video_embed/Groupvideo.2993395
The New Dark Age 