Global

When the hijacked planes hit the twin towers of the World Trade Center, pierced the Pentagon and buried into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, most of our thoughts were about the cruel, horrific shattering of family bonds, the forever severing of deep friendships, the senseless destruction of human life.  More than that America was under threat and fear prevailed.

The never-ending heartache of loss was on display in photos with messages that ringed the fence of a church near ground zero in New York:  “Have you seen him?”  “Please, any information, call…”  “Please help us find our wife and mother.”   

Hundreds of messages. No responses.

I was in New York a few days after 9/11 and witnessed the devastation.  I traveled to the site where Flight 93 impacted.  And I had heard the plane hit the Pentagon, as I joined hundreds evacuating the Congressional House Office Buildings in Washington, D.C.    

I read the news – invasion of Iraq! twentieth anniversary! – and struggle to transcend the abstraction of my remorse. A million killed? Half a million? The mortality stats vary depending on the source’s politics.

But beyond the numbers looms an indifference that defines what is called “news.”

“Today, 20 years after the president ordered the airstrikes that rained down on Baghdad on the night of March 20, 2003, the war is widely seen in Washington’s power centers as a lesson in failed policymaking, one deeply absorbed if not thoroughly learned.”

Just reading those words – a paragraph in a New York Times analysis of the invasion, two decades later – instantly turns a citizen into a spectator. A lesson of failed policymaking! We’re talking about murdering children, for God’s sake, annihilating a social structure, driving millions of people out of their homes and shattering their lives. Somehow the term “failed policymaking” doesn’t do it justice.

It ought to be easy. Open bank vault, remove weapons dealers, close bank vault. In reality, we need a ton of tools, work, and luck.

In constant dollar terms, after Korea, Vietnam, Reagan’s second term, and Obama’s first term U.S. military spending went down, just never as much as it had gone up. So, ending wars, including Cold Wars, may help.

We now have a war underway in which the U.S. participation is understood as primarily spending money. Ending that spending could be expanded into reducing military spending more broadly.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-us-corporation-as-psychopath/5345811

 Region: USA

As hundreds of thousands, throughout Israel, joined anti-government protests, questions began to arise regarding how this movement would affect, or possibly merge, into the wider struggle against the Israeli military occupation and apartheid in Palestine. 

 Pro-Palestine media outlets shared, with obvious excitement, news about statements made by Hollywood celebrities, the likes of Mark Ruffalo, about the need to “sanction the new hard right-wing government of (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu”.

Back in 2021, we had the revelation of emails from the German Interior Ministry which showed that it enlisted scientists to scare the population.

Last year it, was revealed that the Covid statistics had been falsified by Dutch Health Minister Hugo de Jonge by inflating the numbers.

And now we have the revelation of over 100,000 WhatsApp messages from former British Health Minister, Matt Hancock. The British “Daily Telegraph” has put them online as "The  Lockdown Files”. 

From all these revelations, it has been shown time and again that the coronavirus was no more deadly than other cold and flu viruses. As we know from flu and colds, these can be fatal to vulnerable, very old people. For anyone under 80, these viruses are almost never fatal. So it was with Covid-19. It was a common cold virus.

Minister Matt Hancock had a discussion with then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson, via WhatsApp about this low mortality rate. He wrote that this was a problem because it meant that vaccination targets would not be met.

This is from one of the people I’m least likely to bother quoting:

“We need a national divorce. . .  From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrats’ traitorous America Last policies, we are done.”

The words are those of our fellow American, Marjorie Taylor Greene, sputtering unhinged right-wing comedy for all the country to hear. The point she’s making, of course, is anything but unique. The right-wing chorus of snarling contempt is everywhere, focused essentially on a single word, which is the darling enemy of the moment: Woke.