AMERICAN DUPLICITY

JASON HIRTHLER—Hong Kong is ablaze. Venezuelan streets are thousands-strong with Bolivarians. Gilets Jaunes crowd the cobbled avenues of French capitals. Hondurans are rattling their neoliberal conman. Yet we hear only about the flour-pure pleas of innocent Asians whose petrol bombs bear the stamp of democracy, but not of a Latin demos chanting to loose the chains of imperial sanctions. Only those uprisings that can be suitably cloaked in free-market groupthink are cast in the spotlight.

STEVEN SAHIOUNIE—Since 2014 Saudi Arabian authorities have reported over one hundred Houthi missile interceptions. The Houthis are known to own the Scud-B and -C missiles, the North Korean Hwasong variants, the Tochka missile, the Qaher-1 missile, the Zelzal-3 ballistic missile, and the C-802 anti-ship cruise missile. The Houthis have proved themselves to be a formidable force through their possession of powerful missile systems, and have domestically developed technology furthering their arsenal.

PHILIP A. FARRUGGIO—Trump and his backers, the true ‘ Deep State Military Industrial Empire’, have succeeded in sucking in millions of blue collar and white collar Amerikans. They play upon the covert and sometimes overt racism that many white citizens have. The Republicans, for generations , have used the tactic of ‘ Keep the black and brown skins away from our neighborhood and our schools… and our children’  to get the votes needed. Of course, along with that undertone of rhetoric, they also played the Fear Card of terrorism, both overseas and of course right here at home. It was they who concocted the use of the word Homeland to mirror what Goebbels used ( Fatherland) to trumpet German ethnocentrism . As with the Nazi mindset, the Republicans always celebrated Amerika having a strong military. How many times has this writer have had to hear ‘ Thank you for your service’ when the embedded mainstream media interviews a military person?

PHILP GIRALDI—But the reality is, of course, that Friedman does not have dual loyalty. He has real loyalty only to Israel, which he demonstrates repeatedly by uncritically supporting everything the kleptocratic Netanyahu regime does with nary a pause to consider actual American interests. He has supported the weekly slaughter of unarmed Gazan civilians by Israeli sharpshooters, praised the bombing of Syria, pushed for the move of the US Embassy to Jerusalem, applauded the recognition by Washington of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and is an active supporter of and contributor to the illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank.

MAX BLUMENTHAL—The NED’s first success was the defeat of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua’s 1990 elections, replacing it with the neoliberal party of Violeta Chamorro.

Since then, the NED’s advanced US interests in countless countries: it helped swing a Russian election for Boris Yeltsin in 1996, it drove a failed coup attempt in Venezuela in 2002, it orchestrated a successful one in Haiti in 2004, and another one in Ukraine in 2014, which paved the way for neo-Nazis to move into the mainstream.