JANICE KORTKAMP—China of course hasn’t been shredding one country after another in endless wars sold with pure lies like the US war machine has. Reports usually say at least a million people, but in reality many millions are dead now because of US wars and interventions just in the past 20 years. Tens of millions have been displaced from their homes. Economies and infrastructures of several countries have been laid waste. Trillions have been spent and trillions more are unaccounted for by the Pentagon. Thousands of Americans have been killed in these conflicts with thousands more suffering from PTSD, drug and alcohol abuse and addictions, unemployment, homelessness, while suicides among veterans and active serving are far above even the horrific civilian rates.
US EXCEPTIONALISM
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CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—“Tankie” used to be a term which referred specifically to British communists who supported the Soviet Union, but under the facilitation of narrative managers like Smith it’s enjoying a mainstream resurrection in which it is commonly weaponized against anyone to the left of Bernie Sanders who opposes US imperialist agendas. I wrote against anti-imperialism for years without anyone ever applying that pejorative to me, but now it comes up on a near-daily basis. I haven’t changed the basics of my beliefs or my approach to anti-imperialism, but the widespread use of “tankie” as a pejorative against people like me most certainly has changed.
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The Assassination and Resurrection of Martin Luther King, Jr.
50 minutes readEDWARD CURTIN—On March 30, 2018, The Washington Post’s crime reporter, Tom Jackman, published a four-column front-page article, “Who killed Martin Luther King Jr.? His family believes James Earl Ray was framed.” While not close to an endorsement of the trial’s conclusions, it is a far cry from past nasty dismissals of those who agreed with the jury’s verdict as conspiracy nuts or Hitler supporters. After decades of clouding over the truth of MLK’s assassination, some rays of truth have come peeping through, and on the front page of the WP at that. Jackman makes it very clear that all the surviving King family members – Bernice, Dexter, and Martin III – are in full agreement that James Earl Ray, the accused assassin, did not kill their father, and that there was and continues to be a conspiracy to cover up the truth.
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AJAMU BARAKA—The major contradiction that Marx identified was between the capitalists and the workers. And that’s a continuing contradiction, but at this stage of monopoly global capital and the irrationality of these processes, the major contradiction today, in my opinion, is between capitalism—the capitalist class—and collective humanity. We have to take power from these maniacs if we’re going to survive. So there’s an objective, material need for us to recognize that we have an interest in taking power back from the capitalist class if we want to survive for ourselves and for our children.
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The U.S. Pivot to Asia: Cold War Lessons From Vietnam for Today
36 minutes readCYNTHIA CHUNG–As discussed in part one of this series, with the Eisenhower-Nixon victory in 1952, the culmination of years of political strategizing by Wall Street Republican power brokers, the new heads of the State Department and the CIA were selected as none other than Foster and Allen Dulles respectively; and they would go on to direct the global operations of the most powerful nation in the world. It is for this reason that the 1952 presidential election has gone down in history as the triumph of “the power elite.”