RAMIN MAZAHERI—We can’t compare the assassinations of Iranians with allegations (which did arise amid a once in a half-century Russophobia campaign in the West) that Russia poisoned a convicted double agent inside the United Kingdom. Not only did Western countries issue actual condemnations, unlike with the illegal murder of Fakhrizadeh, but they even expelled over 150 Russian diplomats. The largest point to make clear is regarding why Iranians get this extraordinary (inhumane) treatment. It’s important for journalists to answer the short-term question of, “Why Fakhrizadeh?”, but we must also answer the long-term question of “Why Iran?” The reality is that the average Westerners doesn’t even know how they got to this point.
VIRTUALUNIV
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A Biden Administration Will Be Dominated by More U.S. Aggression
22 minutes readCHRISTOPHER BLACK—The Biden administration will be bent on war. If Biden was at all concerned about peace he would be denouncing Trump’s new minister of defense, Colonel Christoper Miller, and Trump’s aggressive policies towards Russia and China; Biden would be elaborating a global peace initiative by the new administration. Instead he is seeding his administration with the most reactionary leftovers from the Obama years. All war criminals. Biden’s rhetoric against China is even more hostile than Trump’s. But it does not matter who is in power in the USA since both parties are controlled by factions of the corporate-military complex that seeks to continue and expand American hegemony.
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The Slow-motion Assassination of Julian Assange
15 minutes readKIM PETERSEN—Recently, circumstances have become bleaker for Assange because of a reported COVID-19 outbreak where “at least 56 people in his house block in Belmarsh prison, including staff and inmates, were found to have been infected.”
Wikileaks earlier reported that Assange, along with almost 200 other inmates of his house block, have been under lockdown since November 18.
Australia has done nothing for its citizen Assange. Australia is said to function at the behest of the US. This is so much so that Australia has put itself in a precarious economic situation with its largest trade partner, China. Furthermore, Australia has a long history of its own war criminality that it ignores.
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BILL VAN AUKEN—While officials in Israel and the US refused to comment on the assassination, the response in both countries left little to the imagination as to the authorship of this extraordinary act of international lawlessness. Trump triumphantly retweeted a comment by an Israeli journalist that the murder represented “a major psychological and professional blow for Iran.”
Israel’s Jerusalem Post, reflecting the views of the right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, commented that the assassination was “a major signal that Israel and the United States will not give up on preventing the country from obtaining such weaponry. The message is clear: Remember, no nuclear scientist is safe.”
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INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS: HOW POLITICAL SCIENCE AND NEOCLASSICAL ECONOMICS ZOMBIFIES THE YANKEE POPULATION
59 minutes readBRUCE LERRO—If you received an undergraduate college degree you probably never had a class in political economy. What you probably had is at least one class in political science and another class in economics. If you are like most people, you found these classes either boring or incomprehensible. Why? The answer is because both fields are riddled with capitalist propaganda that has little basis in most people’s experience. Sure, there are some people who are convinced that political science and neoclassical economics make sense but which social class is this? Chances are it is members of the upper middle class for whom political and neoclassical economics make sense from their class position. But upper middle-class people are 10% of the Yankee population.