IMPERIALISM

ALASTAIR CROOKE—Let us consider Turkey: Its leadership has tossed aside its mask. Ah yes, Turkey has been supporting (moderate?) Islamist opponents to President Assad? But, suddenly, the mask is gone — “Idlib is ours” (i.e. is Turkish). “Aleppo like Hatay, is Turkish too”. Neo-Ottomanism; pan-Turkicism. Yes, the Arab world has noticed, and Gulf States are quickly making good with Damascus against this neo-Ottomanism.

ALAN MACLEOD—In 2016, Georgia Governor Nathan Deal signed a law requiring any person or organization entering into a contract with the state worth at least $1,000 sign an oath promising that they would not oppose the Israeli government in any fashion. CAIR has reason to believe they could overturn the law its Georgia Executive Director, Edward Ahmed Mitchell, called “blatantly and hilariously unconstitutional.”

HELEN BUYNISKI—Coronavirus is not the doomsday epidemic it is being portrayed as by irresponsible media actors. But as the Lock Step scenario makes clear, one does not need massive die-off or victims exploding in geysers of blood in the streets to achieve desired social goals. It’s possible the novel coronavirus epidemic is a “dry run,” a test of both China’s readiness to handle an outbreak and of the international community’s reaction to such a plague. It’s even possible, though unlikely, that the epidemic was a mistake – that the virus escaped from a lab, likely American, by accident.

BUT, just how bad is this “terrible” epidemic? For starters, it’s not the Black Death, it does not act as a contagion. Nor is it anything as dreadful as the Ebola virus. In terms of actual numbers, its footprint so far is infinitesimal. 10,000 infected people with about 200+ deaths is not exactly cataclysmic in a nation of 1.4 billion people. The regular flu in the US is a much bigger threat to life than the coronavirus, yet we take it all in stride and there is hardly a fear porn campaign by the media, the politicians and the rest of the noise machine controlled by the American state.

PAL STEIGAN—It is nothing new that small nations rely on geopolitical situations to achieve some form of national independence. This was the case, for example, for my home country Norway. It was France’s defeat in the Napoleonic War that caused Denmark to lose the province of Norway to Sweden in 1814, but at the same time it created space for a separate Norwegian constitution and internal self rule. All honor to the Norwegian founding fathers of 1814, but this was decided on the battlefields in Europe.