EDWARD J CURTIN—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.
BOUGHT POLITICIANS & PHONIES
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THIERRY MEYSSAN—The Biden Administration has therefore invited General Benny Gantz, the former alternative Prime Minister and since October 12 Minister without Portfolio, to consult in the United States, despite the opposition of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s a kind of backlash to the way the latter was invited to deliver a speech before Congress against the advice of President Barack Obama, in 2015. The United States is keen to show that it is in charge and no one else.
The United States feels compelled to act. Russia has invited sixty Palestinian political organizations to Moscow. It urged them to unite and convinced Hamas to accept the PLO charter, i.e. to recognize the State of Israel.
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CJ HOPKINS—OK, sure, in a non-democratic totalitarian system, such public “admissions of mistakes” — and the synchronized dissemination thereof by the media — would just be a part of the process of whitewashing the authorities’ fascistic behavior during some particularly totalitarian phase of transforming society into whatever totalitarian dystopia they were trying to transform it into (for example, a three-year-long “state of emergency,” which they declared to keep the masses terrorized and cooperative while they stripped them of their democratic rights, i.e., the ones they hadn’t already stripped them of, and conditioned them to mindlessly follow orders, and robotically repeat nonsensical official slogans, and vent their impotent hatred and fear at the new “Untermenschen” or “counter-revolutionaries”), but that is obviously not the case here.
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MARGARET KIMBERLEY—The response to millions of people expressing outrage over genocide was treated as a public relations stunt, which is what SOTU and the U.S. presidency have become.
If nothing else SOTU laid bare the utter fraudulence of the Biden presidency. It is harder to make the case of lesser evilism or holding one’s nose to vote when the betrayals are so blatant. Claims of moving Biden to the left or holding feet to the fire were always made by the cynical to the naive. Both the con artists and their targets have a lot of explaining to do when Biden used the SOTU speech to appeal directly to the Trump voters we are otherwise told to view as deplorable.
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How Many Gazans Have Already Died? Perhaps 200,000.
16 minutes readEDITOR—It matters greatly whether the aggregate toll so far, and counting, is three, four, five, six times more than the Health Ministry’s undercount. It matters for elevating the urgency for a permanent cease-fire, and direct and massive humanitarian aid by the U.S. and other countries, bypassing the sadistic cruelty against innocent families of the Israeli siege. It matters for the columnists and editorial writers who have been self-censoring themselves, with some, like the Post’s Charles Lane, fictionally claiming that Israel’s military doesn’t “intentionally target civilians.” It matters for accountability under international law.