by Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog
In less than three months France will have a presidential vote, and I haven’t written much about it because I’ve been too occupied with what I humbly hope will be the authoritative book on the Yellow Vest movement. The working title is France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s Best Values.
(Issue 01/22, also available as a PDF)
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Welcome to our first issue of the year, with features on:
Plus, all our other news, links and documentation – and don’t forget to check out our extensive roundup of news from across Europe from the last month.
Can Europe survive without Russian gas?The formal US response to Russia’s demands for security guarantee was delivered to the foreign ministry in Moscow on Wednesday. Moscow’s worst fears came true: Washington simply ducked without addressing the main Russian concerns — NATO’s expansion, rollback of NATO deployments to pre-1997 level, etc. —and instead offered to discuss confidence-building measures.
Pianist Sibu Mashiloane’s new album enacts the collective dance of South African jazz. It is his sixth album in six years, and a work of many trusted hands.
9 January 2022: A portrait of pianist Sibu Mashiloane. His new album, Music From My People, is his sixth in six years. (Photograph by Hugh Mdlalose)Setting goals is one thing; meeting them sometimes another. But pianist Sibusiso “Mash” Mashiloane vowed in 2017 he would release an album a year until 2023 – and number six, Music From My People, has just landed. Conceived on a much grander scale than its predecessors, it involves 17 other musicians and brings together his music praxis and the theoretical insights his academic research into the identity of South African jazz is mining.
There may be some duplication due to cross-posting and may be updated throughout the day, so please check back. If it gets updated, I usually insert the time on the line above. A lot of cross-posting usually indicates that the article is popular.
[Ironic headline of the day is the BBC’s, ‘Ukraine crisis: Don’t create panic, Ukraine tells West‘]
Panic and chaos is clearly stetting in as the West fears peace above all else
http://thesaker.is/panic-and-chaos-is-clearly-stetting-in-as-the-west-fears-peace-above-all-else/
What You Should Really Know About Ukraine
https://fair.org/home/what-you-should-really-know-about-ukraine/
Anti-Putin PropagandaMargaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
The 2014 U.S. sponsored coup against the elected government of Ukraine must be the starting point for any discussion of the current crisis. That crisis has been manufactured by Joe Biden, who was the Obama administration point person in using Ukraine as a means of destabilizing Russia.
By Mike Whitney
“The main issue is our clear position on the unacceptability of further NATO expansion to the East and the deployment of highly-destructive weapons that could threaten the territory of the Russian Federation.” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov
Washington delivered a slap in the face to Moscow on Wednesday when U.S. ambassador John Sullivan provided a written response to Russia’s proposals for security guarantees. The missive was given to Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko who did not reveal the contents but passed them on to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov for analysis. Lavrov, in turn, issued a statement on Thursday morning confirming our worst suspicions that the Biden administration has shrugged off Russia’s reasonable demands choosing instead to intensify the provocations that are likely to trigger a war between the world’s two nuclear superpowers. This is an excerpt from an article at Tass News Agency: Continue reading
Ukraine and U.S. War Propaganda
The 2014 U.S. sponsored coup against the elected government of Ukraine must be the starting point for any discussion of the current crisis. That crisis has been manufactured by Joe Biden, who was the Obama administration point person in using Ukraine as a means of destabilizing Russia.
MANIFESTO: The 1959 Pan Africanist Manifesto
The Pan African Congress of Azania’s 1959 Manifesto provides a radical blueprint for African self-determination.
[Source: reddit.com]Check out Politico’s latest “independent” news story designed to scare the bejeezus out of its readers and justify the cry for more and bigger military hardware contracts to fatten the coffers of our leading weapons makers.
There’s an absurdity to humanity’s current predicament of standing on the brink of World War III. This is that the decisive factor behind why the U.S. and Russia are close to war has not been the geopolitical struggles, the economic competition, or the imperialist military encirclement around Russia, but the strange and insipid tools that the imperialists have used to bring these factors to the present point. Their sabotage of the international balance wouldn’t have been possible without the paranoid, conspiratorial, and consequently goofy propaganda campaigns that Washington has carried out throughout the last decade’s new cold war.
Continue reading
The New Dark Age 