1 August 2019 — Mint Press
Cotler’s campaigns for foreign regime change or intervention almost always march in lock-step with neoconservative U.S. foreign policy. His “humanitarian” branding is but a thin veneer of hypocrisy to conceal his establishment policies — policies that almost always serve the interests of Israel.
12 October 2013 — williambowles.info
This past week, we saw the mouthpiece of Imperialism, the Norwegian Nobel Committee award its ‘Peace Prize’ to the UN’s Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), before it’s even completed its work (if it ever will or can)! Almost exactly one year ago following the awarding of the Nobel ‘Peace Prize’ to the European Union for its participation in the invasion of Libya and the overthrow of a sovereign state, the eminent academic Francis A. Boyle wrote the following, a statement that applies equally to this year’s award: Continue reading
8 September 2013 — China Matters
2 September 2013 — 21st Century Wire
The simple question with a lot of answers is why did France boycott the 2003 Iraq war of the US and Britain, but remained heavily committed to a “punitive attack” with the US on Syria, following the shock of Cameron’s defeat for his war plan in the British parliament?
15 August 2013 — WashingtonsBlog
I sat in the courtroom all day on Wednesday as Bradley Manning’s trial wound its way to a tragic and demoralizing conclusion. I wanted to hear Eugene Debs, and instead I was trapped there, watching Socrates reach for the hemlock and gulp it down. Just a few minutes in and I wanted to scream or shout.
7 October 2011 , 2011 — VTJP
News
International Middle East Media Center
Bil’in Holds Its Weekly Protest Against The Wall
IMEMC – Saturday October 08, 2011 – 02:50, Dozens of local residents, accompanied by Israeli and international peace activists, held on Friday the weekly nonviolent protest against the Israeli Annexation Wall and settlements, in Bil’in village, near the central West Bank city of Ramallah.
11 June 2011 — williambowles.info
Will Wikileaks founder Julian Assange win Nobel Peace Prize 2011?
Mirror.co.uk
Julian Assange, founder of the anti-secrecy website Wikileaks, is on the long shortlist and gets a 20-1 quote from Victor Chandler to win. This is despite Assange being on a sexual assault charge – presumably for screwing the United States government. …
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2011/06/11/will-wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-win-nobel-peace-prize-2011-115875-23194532/
4 February, 2011 — creative-i.info
WikiLeaks’ Assange May Gain From Swedish `Haste’ in Extradition
Bloomberg
By Erik Larson – Fri Feb 04 00:00:01 GMT 2011 Julian Assange, founder of
the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. Photographer: Carl Court/AFP/Getty
Images …
www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-04/wikileaks-assange-may-gain-from-swedish-haste-in-extradition.html
6 January, 2010 — www.killinghope.org
Lincoln Gordon died a few weeks ago at the age of 96. He had graduated summa cum laude from Harvard at the age of 19, received a doctorate from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, published his first book at 22, with dozens more to follow on government, economics, and foreign policy in Europe and Latin America. He joined the Harvard faculty at 23. Dr. Gordon was an executive on the War Production Board during World War II, a top administrator of Marshall Plan programs in postwar Europe, ambassador to Brazil, held other high positions at the State Department and the White House, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, economist at the Brookings Institution, president of Johns Hopkins University. President Lyndon B. Johnson praised Gordon’s diplomatic service as “a rare combination of experience, idealism and practical judgment”.
You get the picture? Boy wonder, intellectual shining light, distinguished leader of men, outstanding American patriot.
Abraham Lincoln Gordon was also Washington’s on-site, and very active, director in Brazil of the military coup in 1964 which overthrew the moderately leftist government of Jo„o Goulart and condemned the people of Brazil to more than 20 years of an unspeakably brutal dictatorship. Human-rights campaigners have long maintained that Brazil’s military regime originated the idea of the desaparecidos, “the disappeared”, and exported torture methods across Latin America. In 2007, the Brazilian government published a 500-page book, “The Right to Memory and the Truth”, which outlines the systematic torture, rape and disappearance of nearly 500 left-wing activists, and includes photos of corpses and torture victims. Currently, Brazilian President Luiz In·cio Lula da Silva is proposing a commission to investigate allegations of torture by the military during the 1964-1985 dictatorship. (When will the United States create a commission to investigate its own torture?)
11 December, 2009 — Global Research – Stop NATO – 2009-12-10
President and commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States Barack Obama delivered his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance address in Oslo on December 10, which has immediately led to media discussion of an Obama Doctrine.
With obligatory references to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi (the second referred to only by his surname) but to no other American presidents than Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy – fellow peace prize recipients Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter weren’t mentioned – the U.S. head of state spoke with the self-assurance of the leader of the world’s first uncontested superpower and at times with the self-righteousness of a would-be prophet and clairvoyant. And, in the words of German philosopher Friedrich von Schlegel, a prophet looking backward.
Accompanied by visionary gaze and cadenced, oratorical solemnity, his comments included the assertion that “War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man.” Unless this unsubstantiated claim was an allusion to the account in the Book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible of Cain murdering his brother Abel, which would hardly constitute war in any intelligible meaning of the word (nor was Cain the first man according to that source), it is unclear where Obama acquired the conviction that war is coeval with and presumably an integral part of humanity.
Paleontologists generally trace the arrival of modern man, homo sapiens, back 200,000 years, yet the first authenticated written histories are barely 2,400 years old. How Obama and his speechwriters filled in the 197,600-year gap to prove that the practice of war is as old as mankind and implicitly inseparable from the human condition is a question an enterprising reporter might venture to ask at the next presidential press conference.
4 November, 2009 — www.killinghope.org
“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” — Voltaire
Question: How many countries do you have to be at war with to be disqualified from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize?
Answer: Five. Barack Obama has waged war against only Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. He’s holding off on Iran until he actually gets the prize.
Somalian civil society and court system are so devastated from decades of war that one wouldn’t expect its citizens to have the means to raise serious legal challenges to Washington’s apparent belief that it can drop bombs on that sad land whenever it appears to serve the empire’s needs. But a group of Pakistanis, calling themselves “Lawyers Front for Defense of the Constitution”, and remembering just enough of their country’s more civilized past, has filed suit before the nation’s High Court to make the federal government stop American drone attacks on countless innocent civilians. The group declared that a Pakistan Army spokesman claimed to have the capability to shoot down the drones, but the government had made a policy decision not to. 1
The Obama administration, like the Bush administration, behaves like the world is one big lawless Somalia and the United States is the chief warlord. On October 20 the president again displayed his deep love of peace by honoring some 80 veterans of Vietnam at the White House, after earlier awarding their regiment a Presidential Unit Citation for its “extraordinary heroism and conspicuous gallantry”. 2 War correspondent Michael Herr has honored Vietnam soldiers in his own way: “We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality. Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.” 3
27 October, 2009 — Atlantic Free Press
Edward L. Bernays began his seminal 1928 book, egregiously titled ‘PROPAGANDA’, with these revealing words in the very first chapter ‘ORGANIZING CHAOS’:
‘THE conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
‘We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet. They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons—a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million—who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.’
27 October, 2009 — Global Research
‘The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.’ — Edmund Burke, 1729-1797.
‘Oh God! That men should put an enemy in their mouths and steal away their brains.’ — Othello, William Shakespeare, 1546-1616.
Ten months of an Obama Administration seems an eternity away from the hope he had inspired in so many.
‘Let’s seek a better world in our time’, said Obama, as he travelled Abraham Lincoln’s path to the January 20th inauguration – coincidentally paraphrasing Winston Churchill’s speech at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri (5th March 1946) where he was introduced by President McClure.
As the President-to-be headed for Washington, to swear the oath on a bible used by Lincoln, did he ponder on Lincoln’s: ‘With malice toward none; with charity for all’?
In the inaugural address Barack Hussein Obama vowed: ‘To the Muslim world, we seek a way forward, based on mutual respect.’ The following day, he stated: ‘Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstone of this Presidency.’ On 24th January, the (London) Independent opined: ‘With a stroke of the pen, Mr. Obama halted his predecessors … policy to (bend) the U.S. Constitution and international legal obligations under the Geneva Conventions.’
Eight days in, he told Al-Arabiya: ‘My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that Americans are not your enemy’ (as he prepared to send thousands more troops to cull humanity in the villages and valleys of Afghanistan.)
11 October, 2009 — Global Research
Vers La Verité Speech in Paris
President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize was not the only news yesterday. And in my opinion, it’s not even the biggest news. It’s not even the saddest news. But it does provide us with some critical information as we move forward. The three-part question for us, tonight however, is “What are we moving forward TO; is that the place we want to go; and if not, what do we do about it?
In other words, “What is our vision for the future and how do we define success?”
I have been and am still in deep pain over the institutional homicide of my aunt and in my grief, I’ve considered giving up.
But then, I wiped the tears from my eyes long enough to remember communities of people that I’ve been blessed enough to get to know, from Toronto, Canada to Cape Town, South Africa; from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Valdosta, Georgia, there are people struggling through their own pain, their own deep personal disappointments to reach a better place—not just for themselves, but for the global community of man. And I know deep in my own heart, as broken as it is, that I cannot give up. My brain tells me that the struggle for truth, justice, peace, and dignity is too important to lose because of heartbreak.
10 October, 2009 — Middle East Report Online
| For background on the Mitchell mission, see Mouin Rabbani and Chris Toensing, “The Continuity of Obama’s Change,” Middle East Report Online, January 27, 2009. For more on the “trigger line” in northern Iraq, see Quil Lawrence, “A Precarious Peace in Northern Iraq,” Middle East Report Online, October 1, 2009. |
A Minnesota farm boy gets accepted to Yale. On his first day on campus, ambling down the oak-shaded lanes, he meets a toothy young swell whose blood matches his navy blazer. The two exchange words of praise for the pleasant autumn afternoon, and then the Minnesotan ventures a query.
“So,” he says, with rounded vowel, “could you tell me where the library is, then?”
The Yankee’s smile fades. “Here at Yale,” he remarks, with clipped consonant, “we do not end our sentences with conjunctions.”
“Oh,” the Minnesotan replies, pausing briefly before continuing. “Well, let me rephrase that. So, could you tell me where the library is, then, asshole?”
In the great white north, such yarns are spun as commentary upon the noxious haughtiness of the Mayflower set, but also upon the knack of those of Scandinavian heritage for what might be called over-understatement. This delicate art, passed down from one generation of phlegmatic Norwegian and stoic Swede to the next, is employed to put the priggish in their place. Over-understatement is drawn from the sub-Arctic folk wisdom that revenge is best served, well, not cold, exactly, but chilled.
10 March, 2009 Countercurrents.org
The best understanding of a martyr is one who chooses to suffer, to die rather than renounce their principles. A martyr is also one who has given themselves up as a witness. The essence of Christianity is to bear witness to what Jesus was always on about; forgiveness, love, reconciliation and the intrinsic equality of all people.
Within days of the announcement of a record 205 nominations for 2009’s Nobel Peace Prize, [one of several prizes endowed by Swedish industrialist and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel] perpetual nominee Mordechai Vanunu declined the honor in a letter to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Oslo:
I am asking the committee to remove my name from the nominations…I cannot be part of a list of laureates that includes Simon Peres…Peres established and developed the atomic weapon program in Dimona in Israel…Peres was the man who ordered [my] kidnapping…he continues to oppose my freedom and release…WHAT I WANT IS FREEDOM AND ONLY FREEDOM….FREEDOM AND ONLY FREEDOM I NEED NOW.
The New Dark Age 