IMPERIALIST SICKNESS

Rania Khalek and Anya Parampil pay tribute to their friend Kevin Zeese, a long time organizer and anti-war activist in DC.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—A nation that cannot exist without ceaseless war is not actually a nation at all: it’s an ongoing military operation with some suburbs and schools mixed in. A nation that cannot exist without constant war is like a house that can’t exist without constant construction: if your house needed 24/7/365 construction work in order to remain standing, you’d either completely redesign the way it’s built or you would move. This is true of Israel, and on a larger scale it is true of the globe-spanning, empire-like oligarchic world order that is loosely centralized around the United States.

JEFF J. BROWN—Like the Rafic Hariri bombing, Eurangloland will scream that Iran-supported Hezbollah and Syria, the forces that are keeping Lebanon from being overrun and stolen by Israel, are the guilty parties for the Beirut Port explosion. After 13 years of investigation and $1 billion blown, half paid by the USA and France, to reach a UN Tribunal verdict, only one lowly Hezbollah member was charged with being involved in Hariri’s assassination

MAX PARRY—Despite the obvious credibility and authenticity questions regarding the use of such controversial technology, it has not prevented critics from lauding it unquestioningly. Unfortunately, even some in alternative media have been regurgitating the film’s propaganda such as The Intercept, a slick online news publication owned by billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar whose financial ties to the national security state and U.S. soft power institutions conflict with the outlet’s purported mission. Notably, The Intercept’s glowing review of Welcome to Chechnya was written by Mehdi Hasan, a journalist who also works for Al-Jazeera, a news agency owned by the ruling emirs of Qatar, a theocratic dictatorship where homosexuality is actually illegal. 

P. GREANVILLE—Legendary director Oliver Stone (Platoon, Wall Street, JFK, Born on the 4th of July, Salvador, and the indispensable series of interviews with Vladimir Putin) has just released the first volume of his memoirs, Chasing the Light (reviewed here). This video presents a wide-ranging interview with Red Lines host Anya Parampil. Self-effacing for a man of such stature as artist and political activist, Stone touches on many things rarely or ever discussed by the mainstream media: the barbarism of US imperial wars; the training of death squads and support for terrorists; the refuge given to war criminals on American soil after their collaborationist regimes have been finally overthrown at immense cost to patriotic populations.