We only wish it were a gross exaggeration.

BY ALLEN L ROLAND

It is not terrorism that motivates George Bush, or patriotism, or even profiteering. It is fear, pure and simple: Fear of the truth, fear of the world, fear of any data that collides with his faith-based bubble-encapsuled worldview, and fear most of all of the people he would represent : —William Pitt

I have always felt that what Cheney & Bush feared most was that the public would finally wise up to their neocon coup and empire building schemes and rise up against them. That their spy programs and internment camps were not set up to protect the country against terrorists ~ but, instead, to protect the government from an outraged public that had finally seen through this administration’s massive deceptions and lies ~ that began with the 9/11 coverup and continues now with the illegal occupation and oil grab of Iraq along with the current flawed and failed surge. Read the rest of this entry »

BY REGIS DEBRAY
Palestine: a policy of deliberate blindness

Last year President Jacques Chirac asked Régis Debray to study the situation in the Middle East. On 15 January 2007 Debray sent the French authorities the following document on Palestine. It is an important key to understanding a long policy drift whose results are now obvious.

Dennis Ross, formerly the United States envoy to the Middle East, admitted back in 2000 that mistakes had been made in the 1978 Camp David accords: the diplomatic process had not taken enough account of developments on the ground, especially the settlements. The number of Jewish settlers in the Palestinian territories doubled from 1994 to 2000. As many Israelis have settled in the West Bank since the Oslo accords of 1993 as in the previous 25 years. With an international conference again being discussed, it would be a mistake to continue to ignore the real state of affairs. There is no need for a committee of inquiry. The report has already been drawn up, many times over. No conflict in the world is as well documented, mapped and recorded. Read the rest of this entry »

The inescapable flagwaving idiots’ brigade on display.

BY “SL”
CLASSIC ARCHIVES
(This was a t r u t h o u t Reader Submission)
t r u t h o u t is a fraternal site | Friday 09 January 2004

Dear Sir,

My family was one of Hitler’s victims. We lost a lot under the Nazi occupation, including an uncle who died in the camps and a cousin killed by a booby trap. I was terrified when my father went ballistic after finding my brother and me playing with a hand grenade. (I was only 12 at the time, and my brother insisted the grenade was safe.) I remember the rubble and the hardships of ‘austerity’ - and the bomb craters from Allied bombs. As late as the 1980s, I had to take detours while bombs were being removed - they litter the countryside, buried under parking lots,buildings, and in the canals and rivers to this day. Believe me, I learned a lot about Hitler while I was growing up, both in Europe and here in the US - both my parents were in the war and talked about it constantly, unlike most American families. I spent my earliest years with the second-hand fear that trickled down from their PTSD - undiagnosed and untreated in those days. Read the rest of this entry »

BY CHIP BERLET
Originally at The Public Eye - Vol. 18, No. 3

Introduction

John Calvin (Jean Cauvin), the main architect of one of protestantism’s most severe sects, and moral inspiration for New England’s Puritans. The curious thing is that while Calvinism, in general, provided a big legitimacy boost to capitalism, the Puritans hewed to a doctrine that had much more in common with old Catholic doctrine in regard to commerce.

Why are increased sentences and the severe punishment of those convicted of crimes so popular and prevalent in U.S. culture? Since the late 1970s our society has accepted increasingly rigid and vengeful ways of punishing those convicted of crimes. Behind this trend is the momentum of 250 years of a strain of religious philosophies brought to our shores by Pilgrims, Puritans, and other colonial settlers influenced by a Protestant theology called Calvinism. Today, many ideas, concepts, and frames of reference in modern American society are legacies of the history of Protestantism as it divided and morphed through Calvinism, revivalist evangelicalism, and fundamentalism. Even people who see themselves as secular and not religious often unconsciously adopt many of these historic cultural legacies while thinking of their ideas as simply common sense. Read the rest of this entry »

BY CHARLEY REESE

Many Jews oppose Zionism, including some belonging to highly orthodox religious groups, such as Neturei Karta, who are well noted for their valor in protesting Israeli policies.

One of the myths created by the Israeli lobby is that Jews around the world are unanimous in their support of Israel, regardless of what it does. That’s not true and never has been true. Read the rest of this entry »

BY WILLIAM BLUM

“People on the March” (quarto stato)—An idealization tableau of the working class in Italy.

Editors’ Note: This is a chapter from Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. In our view this chapter by Blum raises a perennial question, namely, who gives the US the “right” to interfere at will as if it owned the world? American exceptionalism, inculcated among the US population by ubiquitous indoctrination, is nothing more than a malignant form of collective narcissism, a runaway case of selfishness blocking a decent analysis of our own actions. How would Americans feel if a superpower many, many times stronger than the US chose to meddle in US elections to the extent we routinely have done in other countries, and even openly threaten military action if the outcome of said elections was not to its liking? Is that the way to spread democracy and build good will around the world?

As Blum himself puts it:

“If you flip over the rock of American foreign
policy of the past century, this is what crawls out …

invasions … bombings … overthrowing
governments … suppressing movements
for social change … assassinating
political leaders … perverting
elections … manipulating labor unions …
manufacturing “news” … death squads …
torture … biological warfare …
depleted uranium … drug trafficking …
mercenaries …

It’s not a pretty picture.
It is enough to give imperialism a bad name.”

Chapter 2. Italy 1947-1948—Free elections: Hollywood style

“Those who do not believe in the ideology of the United States, shall not be allowed to stay in the United States,” declared the American Attorney General, Tom Clark, in January 1948.{1} Read the rest of this entry »

BY MICHAEL PARENTI (Originally published in December 2002)

Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen is rich, very rich, and he’s not afraid to show it. Just like fellow softcom billionaire Larry Ellison’s boat, “Rising Sun”, which boasts a 452 ft displacement, at 416 ft long (approx. 1.5 city blocks), ‘The Octopus’ is one of the world’s largest yachts (it’s more like a cruise liner) and cost a whopping $200 million. [The Octopus] has a permanent crew of 60, including several former Navy Seals. It has two helicopters, seven boats, a 10 man submarine and a remote controlled vehicle for crawling on the Ocean floor. The submarine has the capacity to sleep eight for up to two weeks underwater.

On average, owners must spend a minimum of 10 percent of the purchase price every year to keep these yachts in good working condition and cover crew salaries. Therefore “Octopus” which cost Allen US$200 million requires a US$20 million annual budget.
Read the rest of this entry »

BY CHALMERS JOHNSON [Tomdispatch.com]
Posted on May 17, 2007, Printed on July 28, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/51975/

In politics, as in medicine, a cure based on a false diagnosis is almost always worthless, often worsening the condition that is supposed to be healed. The United States, today, suffers from a plethora of public ills. Most of them can be traced to the militarism and imperialism that have led to the near-collapse of our Constitutional system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, none of the remedies proposed so far by American politicians or analysts addresses the root causes of the problem. Read the rest of this entry »

BY DAVID WALSH

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, would have seen no difference between his methods and objectives and those of the neocon cabal in power.

CLASSIC ARTICLES | Originally published April 22, 2003
The presentation of an illegal invasion of a foreign country as a “preventative” or pre-emptive war did not originate with Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld.

The ongoing US aggression in the Middle East raises the most serious questions about the role of the mass media in modern society. In the period leading up to the invasion, the American [corporate] media uncritically advanced the Bush Administration’s arguments, rooted in lies, distortions and half-truths, for an attack on Iraq. It virtually excluded all critical viewpoints, to the point of blacking out news of mass anti-war demonstrations and any other facts that contradicted the propaganda from the White House and Pentagon. Read the rest of this entry »