SERGE HALIMI—With US states taking opposing decisions on abortion, education, criminal justice, or allowing in migrants — according to whether they are Republican or Democrat — both sides have a nagging doubt: is there any point in trying to hold such disunited states together? Republican governors in Texas or Florida are quick to send undocumented migrants on to more welcoming states such as New York or Massachusetts; and respected publications now routinely talk of secession.
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SHARMINE NARWANI—ast week, a cache of around 17,000 documents allegedly hacked from Iranian media outlet Press TV, began making their rounds on social media. Among them are documents which bear my name, passport photo, and signature.
For the past six days, I have been subject to ceaseless attacks on Twitter by supposed “Iranian” accounts accusing me of being a paid propagandist of the Iranian government and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), based on a scurrilous piecing together of fragments of information to create a false perception of my journalism. In the main, these social media “warriors for women’s rights” leach onto my posts and followers, and spew derogatory slurs related to my gender. -
PEPE ESCOBAR—The imperial modus operandi against geopolitical and geoeconomic competitors remains the same: an avalanche of sanctions, embargos, economic blockades, protectionist measures, cancel culture, a military uptick in neighboring nations, and assorted threats. But most of all, warmongering rhetoric – currently elevated to fever pitch.
The hegemon may be “transparent” at least in this domain because it still controls a massive international network of institutions, financial bodies, politicos, CEOs, propaganda agencies and the pop culture industry. Hence this supposed invulnerability breeding insolence.
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ED CURTIN—From attic to cellar to garage, every little cubbyhole, closet, and drawer in this relative’s house was filled with “saved” items. Nothing was ever thrown away. If you walked in the front door, you would never know that the occupants were compulsive keepers. While there were plenty of knick-knacks in evidence like so many houses where the fear of emptiness rules (the emptiness that is the source of freedom and creativity), once you opened a drawer or closet, a secreted lunacy spilled out seriatim like circus clowns from a small car.
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LARRY ROMANOFF—Democracy had always been hyped in the West as the most perfect form of government, but under the influence of an enormous propaganda campaign it soon morphed into the pinnacle of enlightened human evolution, and to a religion in its own right, certainly in the minds of Americans, but in the West generally. Since a multi-party electoral system formed the underpinnings of external (foreign and parasitic) control of the US government, it was imperative to inject this fiction directly into the American psyche. They did so, to the extent that “democracy”, with its thousands of meanings, is today equivalent to a bible passage – a message from God that by its nature cannot be questioned. Bernays and his people were the source of the deep, abiding – and patently false – conviction in every American heart that democracy is a “universal value”.
