DMITRY ORLOV—Events that signal vast, epochal changes in the world often appear minor when viewed in isolation. Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon was just one river crossing; Soviet and American troops meeting and fraternizing at the Elbe was, relatively speaking, a minor event—nowhere near the scale of the siege of Leningrad, the battle of Stalingrad or the fall of Berlin. Yet they signaled a tectonic shift in the historical landscape. And perhaps we have just witnessed something similar with the recent pathetically tiny Battle of East Ghouta in Syria, where the US used a make-believe chemical weapons incident as a pretense to launch an equally make-believe attack on some airfields and buildings in Syria.
US MILITARY
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KOREAN PEOPLE WANT PEACE AND REUNIFICATION. UNCLE SAM DOES NOT. CHINA RISING RADIO SINOLAND
26 minutes readJEFF J. BROWN—It is no understatement to say that Korea’s détente this week is the greatest chance for peace, so far, in the 21stcentury. After living with a US contrived ceasefire for 65 years, the two halves of the artificially divided Korean people are finally promising to sign a full peace treaty by the end of this year and create steps towards reunification (https://www.nknews.org/2018/04/two-koreas-agree-to-end-armistice-agreement-sign-peace-treaty/).
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ADAM DENKER—A few weeks after that, as we were all smoking inside of a bunker, listened to an old sergeant brag about the moped he had bought from one of the spec-ops guys. He gleefully told the story of how the operator (military slang for special-operations soldier) killed a kid (yes, he said kid) who tried to run away from the operator on that moped. The operator left his body there for his parents to find, and kept the moped as a trophy. Who knows if the kid actually was a terrorist, his only crime was running away. But to them only guilty people run away. The story still makes me want to throw up.
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Unfashionable Fascism: Mainstream Politicians Switching Sides Under Trump’s Regime of Barbarism
22 minutes readHENRY A GIROUX—Any resistance to fascism has to be rooted in the call to make education central to politics with a strong emphasis on the teaching of historical consciousness and civic literacy as crucial weapons in the fight against fascism. At the same time, such a fight must take an unwavering standpoint in its refusal to equate capitalism and democracy. Such a battle has to be waged in diverse struggles that can be aligned through a common thread willing to recognize that we are at war over not just the right of economic equality and social justice but also against the powerful and privileged positions of whiteness, a toxic masculinity, and the elimination of the very notion of the social, solidarity, and compassion.
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ERIC ZUESSE—Although the truth about this matter might not be of much interest to voters in any country, it will matter a great deal to the ruling aristocracies in any countries, such as Turkey, which are now making decisions between buying weapons made by the U.S. side, or else buying weapons made by the Russian side. And those decisions, in turn, will factor heavily into the choosing-up-of-sides in WW III, if neither the U.S nor Russia backs down so that a full-fledged hot war between U.S. and Russia results.