Journalist Chris Hedges interviews former combat veteran and US Army officer, Spenser Rapone about bravery and morality. The second lieutenant was given an “other than honorable” discharge June 18 after an Army investigation determined that he “went online to promote a socialist revolution and disparage high-ranking officers” and thereby had engaged in “conduct unbecoming an officer.”
WORLD DESK
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‘US Leadership’—and Other Euphemisms for War
22 minutes readG. SHUPAK—Peter Bergen of CNN (11/7/20) advocated Biden “restor[ing] America’s place in the world as the first among equals in a rules-based international order that has served American interests so well since World War II.” For Bergen, this “rules-based international order” includes militarily occupying countries for indefinite periods. He writes that Biden “should retain a light Special Operations Forces footprint for counterterrorism missions in Afghanistan, and he should say publicly that the US commitment to Afghanistan is a durable one,” lest the US “give comfort to her enemies.”
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An excerpt form the popular Russian talk show “An evening with Vladimir Solovyov”. Translated and subtitled by Eugenia. A well-known Russian filmmaker Karen Shakhnazarov discusses the meaning of the WWII memory for the Russian society and the Russian people. The context of the discussion was the proposed constitutional amendments. Translator’s notes: (1) The Soviet division consisted of 10,000 soldiers. (2) The British light cruiser Edinburgh carrying 5.5 tons of the Russian gold as payment for Western supplies was sunk by a German submarine on its way home from the Soviet port Murmansk in April of 1942. Shakhnazarov mistakenly said that it happened in 1941.
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There is a joke going around Italy these days, after the latest Iranian developments: Italy doesn’t really need a foreign minister, since the position is already taken by a guy named Mike Pompeo, whose origins are, after all, Italian. Pompeo seemingly spent two days on the phone doing his best to inform European allies of what happened, but didn’t have time for a call to his Italian counterpart. Seriously, why bother?
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JASON HIRTHLER—Hong Kong is ablaze. Venezuelan streets are thousands-strong with Bolivarians. Gilets Jaunes crowd the cobbled avenues of French capitals. Hondurans are rattling their neoliberal conman. Yet we hear only about the flour-pure pleas of innocent Asians whose petrol bombs bear the stamp of democracy, but not of a Latin demos chanting to loose the chains of imperial sanctions. Only those uprisings that can be suitably cloaked in free-market groupthink are cast in the spotlight.