What does it mean to be anti-imperialist?

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Billy Bob's Blowback Roundtable
THE WORLD THROUGH AN INDEPENDENT LEFT LENS

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE
Billy Bob is a dedicated anti-imperialist activist and blogger. He hosts the Blowback roundatable.  You can reach him at his Facebook page HERE.

VITAL
  • Thank you for reading this article.
  • If you liked it, please share it widely with your friends and kin.
  • We must act together to smash the power of the filthy Western disinformation machine.
  • Lies cost lives.


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MUST VIDEO: Borderlands – US Empire on the borders of Russia and China

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Garland Nixon

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The selling of US imperialist foreign policy has long proceeded like comic strip plots in which the superheroes scour the globe looking for evildoers. When bad guys are found, intervention is a must on "humanitarian grounds." That's the official "American Way"—for suckers and 10-year-olds. Why is this done?  Because the US empire needs to hide its crimes from the American people. Crimes that now threaten everyone's survival.  Oh, by the way, there is NO DEEP STATE. There's only the US imperialist state. 


BORDERLANDS - US EMPIRE ON THE BORDERS OF RUSSIA AND CHINA
 

SCOTT RITTER: The Empire (and its vassals) is now recklessly toying with nuclear Armageddon. We have been warned.



Truth 4 Change
  • The US and its vassals have put the world on the brink of a NUCLEAR war.
  • And they are committing huge crimes around the world.
  • Unfortunately, this is NOT hyperbole. The Big Lie, Hypocrisy, and Sanctimony drive the US Empire.
  • Almost a century of constant disinformation by the US government has created this emergency.
  • Please pay attention to what this author has to say. And pass it on.
  • Help break the mainstream media malignant brainwashing.
  • Massive ignorance—as we see in Ukraine and Gaza—is paid in countless lives.
  • A system that supports the depraved Gaza genocide does not deserve respect.


Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. And that's a fact. 

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The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

Since the overpaid media shills will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality.


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Performative Politics: Congressional Theater for the Naive

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Annotated by Patrice Greanville

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These periodical performances before Congress are not good for the hoi polloi. They mislead the masses and actually hide the true mechanics of power. At best, these politicians' and bureaucrats' well remunerated minuets are, like the shadows in Plato's cave, only rough and remote approximations, not of a reality, but of an ideal perhaps impossible to realize without the benefit of a revolution. Thus, the fake verbal duels and posturings will never yield a reliable representation of the actual power structure that oppresses the majority, nor of the ominous direction in which it is moving. The captive populations are thereby disarmed by these great exercises in fake information. Think about it for a minute. The very idea that the US regime's "national security" watchdogs—that is, the ruling elite's bodyguards—will level with a bunch of crooked politicians who, themselves, sit in Congress to above all protect the same oligarchs—is an insulting absurdity by definition. Besides, what do you mean "worldwide threats", Kemo Sabe? Threats to whom? Not to me, not to us, ordinary Americans. But here we are. Being scared out of our wits for the umpteenth time by real professionals. And all according to a well-rehearsed and elegant protocol. Who could ask for more?

This elaborate and shameless pantomime is surely the best scam that money can buy, perfected to an art form, but a scam nonetheless.  So, fixate, if you will, on these long and ponderous hours of testimony —Plato's shadows undulating on the walls—because they are a very good simulacrum of what an actually functioning representative democracy might look like if this ruling class was sincere about democracy.  Which is not, simply because it can't afford to be. For starters, a society with an institutionalized core of constantly growing horrid inequality, cannot be a democracy. It must be something else. Call it a plutocracy, an oligarchy, a kakistocracy, but never a democracy. Fact is, a real democracy would quickly kill it. But guess what? We do have a democracy, "a democracy for the few", as Michael Parenti so brilliantly called it, and in this strange animal, the "few", that is, the billionaire class, the 0.0001% of the population, rule exclusively for their benefit. With no apology or effective accountability whatsoever to the much vaster and long-suffering masses. Some cynics have said that this arrangement sounds like a class dictatorship, and they would be right.  What's more, this is the idealised template that most liberal-globalist "democracies" in the collective West so tediously brag about these days, while haughtily denouncing the rest as dangerous authoritarians. Well, that's just another fantasy anyway, because vassal nations without sovereignty cannot enjoy a genuine democracy. 

CERTIFICATION
The professional peddlers of democracy tell us that, in a true democracy, the people rule and make the laws. If that is so, why is it, then, that in the US not even the most popular, obvious, and longed for laws—like universal healthcare, or a decent minimum wage, for example—never seem to get enacted? Answer that, big boy. Don't worry, take your time. 


 


JUST IN: FBI Director Chris Wray Grilled By House Intelligence Committee Members

Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. And that's a fact. 

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The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

Since the overpaid media shills will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality.


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Capitalist DNA Kills: The 737 Max Story. Why The Boeing Problem Will Not Go Away

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Frontline • Moon of Alabama

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Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. And that's a fact. 

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Print this article

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

Since the overpaid media shills will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality.


Unfortunately, most people take this site for granted.
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“The World As It Was”: A Masterly Documentary Film

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Edward J. Curtin, Jr.
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Here’s a film about the 1950s – “The World As It Was” – that will tell you a great deal about life in the U.S.A. today, while disabusing anyone of the notion that nostalgia for that mephitic decade is in order, for it was a time when “democracy” tended toward totalitarianism.  In doing so, it sowed the bitter fruit that is poisoning us today.  Without understanding the long-standing effects of those years, it is impossible to grasp the deepest dimensions of our current nightmare.  Chapter One of the documentary series, Four Died Trying, directed by John Kirby and produced by Libby Handros, appropriately subtitled: “To see where we are, look where we’ve been,” does that brilliantly.

Chapter One – “The World As It Was” – is about the 1950s, the rise of the Cold War with its propaganda, McCarthyism, the development of the military-industrial complex, the CIA, red-baiting, betrayals, blacklists, the abrogation of civil rights, censorship, and the ever present fear of nuclear war and the promotion of fallout shelters that set the stage for the killing fields of the 1960s and the CIA’s ruthless machinations.

One could say that the 1950s were the Foundation of Fear upon which the horrors of the 1960s were built, and that now we are reaping the flowers of evil that have sprung up everywhere we look because the evils of those decades have never been adequately addressed.

The film opens with President Eisenhower delivering his famous Farewell Address, warning about the growing power of the military-industrial complex.  It is a short and powerful speech, concealing not a smidgen of hypocrisy since it must not have been Eisenhower who presided for eight years from 1953-19661 as this complex grew and grew and he poured 2 billion dollars in weapons and aid and a thousand military advisers to the ruthless and corrupt Vietnamese dictator Ngô Dinh Diêm, while saying he was “an example for people everywhere who hate tyranny and love freedom.”  His speech, while still good, reminds me of all those who spend their careers quiet as church mice as the wars and assassinations rage on only to find their voices in opposition once they retire and collect their pensions.

In response to Eisenhower’s speech, some of which we hear, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. – one of a hundred interviews done for this series over six years –  says that Eisenhower’s speech “is probably today in retrospect the most important speech in American history.”  While that is debatable (I would pick JFK’s American University speech), he rightly emphasizes the importance of Ike’s speech and the fact that his uncle, President Kennedy, fought against the military-industrial complex handed him by Eisenhower.  This is important, for although JFK did get elected emphasizing the Cold War rhetoric of a non-existent missile gap between the U.S. A. and the Soviet Union, he very quickly changed, having been betrayed by Allen Dulles and the CIA regarding the Bay of Pigs, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, Vietnam, Laos, etc.  The military brass quickly came to hate Kennedy, a naval war hero from World War II.  His three year transformation into a great peacemaker – and therefore his assassination by the CIA and its friends – is a story many still would like to squelch.  This documentary series will prevent that.

Those who control our present and wish to control our future are hard at work today trying to control our past and they will therefore hate this truthful film that is a powerful antidote to their attempted amnesia.  In thirty-nine sobering and entertaining minutes (with emphasis on both words), “The World As It Was” illuminates a period in U.S. history that is often dismissed as the staid and boring 1950s but was in fact when the infrastructure for today’s censorship, chaos, and fear were laid.  It was not the era, as a baseball movie about Jimmy Piersall and his depression from 1957 put it, when “Fear Strikes Out,” but the time when fear burrowed very deep into the American psyche and anxiety became a weapon of state.  Is it any wonder that today could be called “the age of depression, fear, anxiety, and pill popping”?

It is interesting to note that Eisenhower’s warning also contained an admonition to beware the growth of unchecked science, technology, and a future when computers would replace blackboards.  If he were still alive, he would no doubt not recognize the country controlled by what former CIA analyst Ray McGovern calls the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MICIMATT).  This vast computer-networked monster makes all the warnings about the 1950s snooping, informing, and controlling activities of government agencies seem like child’s play.  They can’t open snail mail now when few send any, but reading computer messages barely necessitates a finger’s movement, or, as Edward Snowden continues to warn, the entire electronic phone system is open sesame for government controllers. Cell phones acting as cells. Blackboards are gone but so is privacy.  The 1950s’ government snooping is pure nostalgia now.  We are through the looking glass.

As then, so today.  Oliver Stone talks about how in those days the constant refrain was “the Russians are coming” and how his father, a Republican stockbroker, told him that “the Russians are inside the country.”  Fear was everywhere, all induced by anti-communist propaganda aimed at controlling the American people.  Stone is still fighting against the Russia bogeyman stories, while today we are told again and again that the Russians are still coming.  We can only assume they are very slow.

Aside from RFK, Jr. and Oliver Stone, in this episode we hear from NYU Professor Mark Crispin Miller, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the screenwriter Zachary Sklar, et al.  Because the film is so ingeniously crafted, many of the most powerful voices – for and against the government repression and fear mongering – are those from newsreels and television shows that are artfully spliced between the commentaries of the aforementioned people. For example, to see and hear FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover rant about communists under every bed and to juxtapose that with the calm words of the filmmaker Dalton Trumbo, blackballed as one of the so-called Hollywood Ten, is an exercise in distinguishing sanity from insanity.

To this is added music, advertisements, movie clips, and jingles from the 1950s culture that place the viewer back in time to feel and absorb the “vibes,” as it were, of those days.  Like any era, it was complicated, but the overriding message from the fifties was not about mom making tuna noodle casserole but was that there were commie traitors everywhere throughout society and that every citizen’s obligation was to turn them in, even if that meant turning yourself or your parents in.  Children were taught to get under their desks when the sirens sounded, for they were safe places when the Commie Nukes start coming in.  Civil Defense drills screeched this fear into your every fiber.  In April 1957 the Army Air Defense Command announced that new Nike Hercules missiles with atomic warheads would shortly be installed around New York City, Boston, Providence, etc. to replace conventional warheads.  A spokesman added that these nuclear warheads posed no danger and that if the missiles were used, fallout would be “negligible.”  Of course.

Let me use an anecdote from pop culture that I think sums this up this sick game of fear and distrust – paranoia.  My parents were on a game show in the fall of 1957 called “Do You Trust Your Wife?” hosted by Johnny Carson. By the summer of 1958 the show’s title was changed to “Who Do you Trust?”  I used to joke that Hoover or Senator Joseph McCarthy was behind the change and their English grammar was atrocious, but I realize it was probably some fearful lackeys in the television industry.

Professor Miller, an expert in propaganda, narrates quite a bit of “The World As It Was” and does so admirably.  He correctly points out that to describe the 1950s as the era of McCarthyism is a misnomer, for doing so “let’s the whole system off the hook.”  It was the entire government apparatus that promoted a vast repression based on fear whose aim was to create meek, deferential, and obedient people afraid of their own shadows.

He points out that the basis for all this was established by President Truman in 1947 with his Executive Order 9835 that required loyalty oaths to root out communists in the federal government.  Six months later the CIA was founded and the country was off to the Cold War races with its anti-communist hysteria and the institutionalization of a militarized society.

The Red Menace, nuclear extinction, and the need to root out those traitors who were conspiring to overthrow the U.S. government by force were pounded into people’s minds.  Not only were these traitors in the government, but in the schools and colleges, the labor and racial equality movements – more or less everywhere.  Whom could you trust?  No one, not even yourself.  While McCarthy was eventually censored for going too far when Joseph Welch accused him of having no decency during the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, he accomplished the goal of injecting his paranoic poison into the social bloodstream where it remains today, part of the political structure shared by both major parties.

But hope arose, as the film concludes, when JFK was elected in 1960 and in his first week in office went to the theater to see the blackballed screenwriter’s Dalton Trumble’s adaptation of Howard Fast’s novel, Spartacus, about a slave revolt in ancient Rome.  Fast was also blacklisted and wrote the novel secretly.  As RFK, Jr. says, this was a symbolic turning point when this was reported on the front page of The New York Times.

Yes, today we are told that the Russians are still coming.  The bad old days are back.  But so also is the slaves’ rebellion.

Four Died Trying is a documentary series that is part of this rebellion.  Chapter One, “The World As It Was” shines a very bright light on disturbing U.S. history.  It shows where we have been in order to help us see where we are.  Don’t miss it.

See author's bio box below. 


Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. And that's a fact. 

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The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

Since the overpaid media shills will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality.


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