Category Archives: Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy

Al Qaeda Has Basically Made Its Own Country In Africa Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Military

businessinsider.com
Rukmini Callimach, Associated Press

Mali AP DO NOT REUSE

AP Photo/File

In this Sept. 16, 2012 file photo, fighters from Islamist group Ansar Dine leave after performing a public amputation, severing the hand of a young man found guilty of stealing rice, in Timbuktu, Mali.

MOPTI, Mali (AP) — Deep inside caves, in remote desert bases, in the escarpments and cliff faces of northern Mali, Islamic fighters are burrowing into the earth, erecting a formidable set of defenses to protect what has essentially become al-Qaida’s new country. More…

Hagel vs Totalitarian Humanism Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism

By Paul Gottfried

I’ve no idea how former Nebraska senator and decorated Vietnam War veteran Chuck Hagel became President Obama’s preferred nominee for the job of Secretary of Defense. But when I learned about Hagel’s prospects, I was delighted. A social conservative with a skeptical view of America’s mission to convert the rest of the world to our current version of democracy, Hagel is someone I’ve long admired. Indeed I was hoping his campaign for president would take off four years ago. (Alas, it didn’t.)

For about a week after Hagel’s name surfaced as a possibility for Secretary of Defense, I was also hoping that his nomination would sail through the Senate effortlessly. I no longer think that’s the case. The Log Cabin Republicans yesterday took out a full-page New York Times advertisement to attack Hagel, who once voiced objections to having those who are openly gay serving in the military. He also objected to the muzzling of free speech in what looked like hate speech laws. His opponents have scolded him for being deficient in sensitivity, and in our politically correct democracy that may be the worst possible offense that any mortal could commit.

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Ex-President George H.W. Bush in Intensive Care Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy

Schwarzkopf’s former partner in crime isn’t doing so well, either.

Voice of America

Former U.S. President George H.W. Bush has been moved to an intensive care unit at a hospital in Houston, Texas.

The former president, 88, was admitted to the hospital last month suffering from bronchitis.  His spokesman says Bush was moved to the intensive care unit Sunday after a “series of setbacks,” including a persistent fever.  The spokesman says Bush continues to be alert and that doctors are “cautiously optimistic” about his treatment.

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Meanwhile, in Mexico: Thousands of Masked Zapatistas March Reply

by • Activism, Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy

Warrior Purblications

Zapatistas Dec 21 chiapas 1

Zapatistas: “to be heard, we march in silence”

by Leonidas Oikonomakis on December 21, 2012

The Zapatistas are back! Flowing like the water of the river that beats the sword. And while some were anticipating the Christmas holidays, some others the end of the Maya calendar, and others still the new Communiqué from the Comandancia General of the EZLN that was announced back in November, the main cities of Chiapas woke up today with memories of 1994.

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The Paranoid Style of the Israel Lobby Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy

original.antiwar.com
Justin Raimondo

The anti-Hagel campaign reveals the psychopathology of radical Zionism

The campaign to demonize Chuck Hagel in the run up to his possible confirmation hearings as Secretary of Defense is going full swing. As I told my readers the other day, “get ready for a mudslide of smears and innuendo as the [Israel] Lobby homes in for the kill.” Twenty-four hours later, there are so many entrants into what appears to be a competition to see who can come up with the nastiest smears that one has a hard time deciding on a winner. After some deliberation, however, I have to give Bret Stephens, the Wall Street Journal’s foreign affairs editor, the prize.

As I predicted, the “Jewish lobby” comment has taken center stage in this manufactured controversy, and Stephens is quick to jump on it: More…

WAR ON REVOLUTION! : The Counter Economics of National Anarchism 1

by • Activism, Anarchism/Anti-State, Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Economics/Class Relations, Left and Right, Strategy

This article is included in the recently released National-Anarchism: Theory and Practice, edited by Troy Southgate and available from Black Front Press.

By Wayne John Sturgeon

Mutualism as Free Market Anti-Capitalism

It was the French philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who first coined the term ‘anarchist’ and produced the economic theory of ‘mutualism’. This original anarchism and mutualism envisaged a society which, contrary to popular notions, was pro private property, patriotist, and advocated a kind of co-operative free marketism through the establishment of a mutual credit bank, which would lend to people at a minimal interest rate to avoid systematic debt creation and usury, etc. Although widely celebrated by the ‘left’ for his slogan ‘property is theft’, this slogan is completely taken out of context and misrepresented; for he also said, ‘property is order’, distinguishing between the

property created by labour and the ‘property’ created by state coercion and exploitation.

Proudhon described mutualism as a ‘synthesis of communism and property’, as he warned that a society with private property but without equality would lead to statist hierarchical relations. This emphasis on the balance between property and equality would later find another attempted resolution in the thinking of Michael Bakuinn who developed a more collectivist strategy, thus paving the way for anarcho-communism via also the significant contributions of Peter Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta etc. Thus, mutualism came to be associated with ‘individualist’ traditions of anarchism. More…

Dissolution Could Be Better Option for States Than All-Out Secession 1

by • Activism, American Decline, Anarchism/Anti-State, Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Secession, Strategy

An interesting take on secession.

• People can withdraw their consent to be ruled by corrupt government

By Mark Anderson
from: American Free Press

Looking at recent headlines about citizens in the 50 states wanting to secede from the federal government, it’s tempting to conclude that they should secede from the federal union due to widespread disgust over Washington’s mismanagement and suffocating central control. But another important concept puts the idea of secession in a new light and suggests there is an alternative in case the White House ignores the people.

That other concept, rarely discussed, is dissolution of the Union. In this context, dissolution means that the modern federal government, through layers of radical statutes, executive orders and harmful constitutional amendments, has departed from the people’s intended constitutional order to such an extreme degree that it has become a different government, alien to the original system laid down by the nation’s founders. Therefore, the constitutional government we’re supposed to be living under has been dissolved.

“You wouldn’t secede from a dissolved government anymore than you would divorce a deceased spouse,” said Ron Avery, a Texas patriot well versed in the writings of America’s founders.

AMERICAN FREE PRESS sat down with Avery to gain a better understanding of this perspective. As Avery sees it, the issue boils down to this: Since the states and their people, which created the original federal government, are being ruled by a rogue regime that reset the dials so much that it overthrew the original constitutional order, then seceding from that unlawful, alien regime is a form of tacit acknowledgement of that imposter government’s legitimacy.

“You don’t secede from a dead union—[instead] you declare it dissolved,” Avery said.

Those freed states could stay separate or form their own unions, he added.

Avery stressed what he sees as a major flaw of secession: It basically “leaves in place” the rogue federal regime that rules its United States subjects and controls most of the world by force and fear. More…

‘He’s Killing His Own People!’ Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy

antiwar.com
by Justin Raimondo

“He’s killing his own people!”

It’s a familiar refrain to those of us who’ve been paying attention the past decade or so: it’s what our leaders in both parties said about Saddam Hussein by way of justifying the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and it’s what they’re saying now about Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who is the regime-changers’ latest target.

No one denies Assad is a murderous tyrant, just as few denied the same appellation to the departed Iraqi despot, but Western outrage when it comes to these matters is extremely selective. After all, the US-supported government of Yemen is also killing its own people in air strikes that get very little attention in the Western media — but since Yemen is on the front lines of our eternal “war on terrorism,” we look the other way. Indeed, air strikes by the US have often been attributed to the Yemenis, who are covering for us — and receiving goodies in return. More…

Manning vs. the Marines Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy

By Kelley B. Vhlahos

As far as villains go, Pfc. Bradley Manning is hardly quintessential. At 5 foot 2 inches tall, his slender frame and bespectacled image has invoked snickers, sarcasm and according to reporting over the last two years, a lifetime of bullying.

Bradley Manning

That bullying reached an apparent apex during his time in the Army. Not only was Manning small, but he was different. He fought back, at least verbally. And it turned out he’s gay. “He was a runt, so pick on him. He’s crazy, pick on him. He’s a faggot, pick on him. The guy took it from every side. He couldn’t please anyone,” one soldier told The Guardian in 2011. One can’t imagine worse conditions than being 21-year-old Manning in Army boot camp.

Except a 23-year-old Manning incarcerated by the Marines.

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Black Friday’s gun-buyer checks set a record Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Fourth Generation Warfare, Police State/Civil Liberties

USA Today

6:37PM EST November 26. 2012 – WASHINGTON — For the second consecutive year, prospective gun buyers joined Black Friday shoppers in record numbers as firearms dealers swamped the FBI with required buyer background check requests.

The FBI fielded 154,873 calls, a roughly 20% increase from last year’s previous one-day record of 129,166, according to bureau records.

The requests came in such volume throughout the day that FBI call centers experienced two brief outages — one of 18 minutes and one for 14 minutes —during the busy day, bureau spokesman Stephen Fischer said Monday.

The FBI does not track actual gun sales. But the number of firearms sold Friday is likely higher because multiple firearms can be included in one transaction by a single buyer.
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President Obama Briefly Worried That His Unaccountable, Murderous Power Might Fall Into Republican Hands Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Electoralism/Democratism, Left and Right, Military

From Reason
by Matt Welch

Drone aftermath in PakistanThe first 61 words of this chilling and banal
New York Times
article are a perfect distillation of how grotesque power
appears in the eye of Americans who wield it:

Facing the possibility that President Obama might not win a
second term, his administration accelerated work in the weeks
before the election to develop explicit rules for the targeted
killing of terrorists by unmanned drones, so that a new
president would inherit clear standards and procedures, according
to two administration officials.

The matter may have lost some urgency after Nov. 6.

A reminder to most Democrats who spent 2002-08 telling us that
abuse of executive
power was at or near the top of the nation’s most urgent moral
concerns: You just didn’t mean it.

Continued

Immigrants Against Empire Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Immigration

By Scott McConnell

Nearly 40 years ago, Daniel Moynihan and Nathan Glazer wrote that “the immigration process is the single most important determinant of American foreign policy.” Immigration determined the ethnicity of the electorate to which our foreign policy responds. “It responds to other things as well, but first of all to the primary fact of ethnicity.”

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