ERIC ZUESSE—America does most of the entire world’s invasions and coups and sanctions. This has been the case ever since 1945. These invasions, coups, and sanctions, aren’t being done in order to conquer a country that attacked America, but are instead being done purely for conquest — 100% aggressive — though “national defense” is always the main excuse that the U.S. Government gives. Only a single quasi-exception to the falsehood of the “national defense” excuse (i.e., the only instance of that excuse having been partly true) has existed, and it was America’s 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, which country likewise had not invaded America, but Al Qaeda had located its headquarters there and so America conquered Afghanistan’s Government, using the 9/11 attacks as its ‘justification’, and this invasion made things even worse for almost everybody (as usually happens from America’s invasions, coups, and sanctions). U.S. imperialism — like that of other countries — doesn’t benefit anyone except the aristocracy (the super-rich) of the invading, coup-promoting, and/or sanctioning, power.
VIRTUAL UNIVERSITY
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The American Farce Unravels: Shreds of January 6th
65 minutes readJIM KAVANAGH—For the U.S. left to build a working-class socialist movement, it must become what it decidedly is not, and hasn’t evinced much interest in being—a pole of attraction for millions of people who are not socialists, do not agree with many of the motley commandments that have become the dogma of the “woke” American left, and are still largely held as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” (Steinbeck actually said “capitalists”) in capitalist ideology. Given the enormous ideological work done by the Fox-MSBNC, Breitbart-NYT media universe, which is the primary source of political education in this country, what else could you expect?
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RAMIN MAZAHERI—Only a know-nothing would say that the USSR, with its 27 million martyrs, didn’t primarily defeat German imperialism. China gave so very much to protect Korea from American invasion, but not as much as North Koreans gave, of course. The sacrifices of the Vietnamese were the most globally galvanising anti-imperialist force in the 20th century – who could ever forget that? Ending South African Apartheid can never be forgotten, but Western media certainly does obscure the role played by Cuban soldiers in repelling attacks from the Western-backed South African Defense Force, which ultimately resulted in the discrediting of the entire South African system and led to the freedom of Angola and modern-day Namibia. And who can forget when Algiers was the “Mecca of revolutionaries”, following the victory of its incredibly inspiring anti-imperialist struggle which overturned 132 years of Algeria “being France”?
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LARRY ROMANOFF—To paraphrase Michael Lewis, “One of the qualities that distinguishes Americans from other people is their naive conviction that every foreigner wishes to be one of them, but even the most zealous Japanese patriot has no illusions that other peoples want to be Japanese”. The Americans not only believe everybody secretly wants to be like them, they believe no nation can succeed or even progress without being like them and adopting the entire American value system. It isn’t possible. There are no alternatives to the American way and, if there were alternatives, God would be displeased with them.
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CALEB MAUPIN—This Caleb Maupin episode is a tour de force, remarkable even by the superior standards that characerize Maupin’s highly accessible historical analyses. In this chat Caleb covers the historical repercussions of the Holocaust, good and bad. From the rise (and fall) of McCarthyism barely 7 years after the Holocaust, to the emergence of the “New Left (“synthetic left” sponsored by the CIA), and its false political categories, such as the equating of Nazism with Communism (Hanna Arendt’s “Totalitarianism”). This false equation continues to sow confusion among a heavily indoctrinated public. By the 1990s, Caleb notes, the ruling class had come up with a new set of variations on the subject, this time, milking the psychic wounds and revulsion toward the Holocaust, by pretending to be committed to the prevention of another Hitler, or the “duty” to intervene to prevent another human rights catastrophe, the empowering of a mass murderer, wherever he may threaten to appear. Our audience is well aware that candidates for regime change, as this foreign policy approach has become known in modern days, are only those whom the empire regards as international foes, or as obstacles to its hegemonist designs. This viciously excoriated group never includes a Washington ally, a roster that includes many of the greatest crooks and murderers of the last two centuries.