WITNESSES TO HISTORY

JAY JANSON—The many bloody and thieving wars ordered by President Obama should make people recall how Obama as a candidate for president ran as a peace candidate, and so be cautioned not to be fooled with the present promising of both this years candidates to end America’s forever wars. Recently, President Trump called the Vietnam War “a stupid war. Anyone who went was a sucker.”  With all President Trump’s macabre and bizarre use of US military, including assassination and deadly sanctions, and mainstream media’s consistent wars promoting, the world is prone to forget how candidate Trump was the most dramatic American denouncer of US wars in history. 

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—In a healthy world, the most powerful government on earth wouldn’t be trying to squint at its own laws in such a way that permits a prosecution of a journalist for telling the truth. In a healthy world, the most powerful government on earth wouldn’t prosecute anyone for telling the truth at all. In a healthy world, governments would prosecute their own war crimes instead of those who expose them. In a healthy world, governments wouldn’t commit war crimes at all. In a healthy world, governments wouldn’t start wars at all.

VANESSA BEELEY—Iran has come to the aid of the Syrian air-force helicopters from Hama airport that were transporting water from Sourani Dam in Tartous to limit the expansion of the fires burning in the inaccessible mountain ranges, impossible to reach with fire brigade vehicles. The risk for Iran to assist Syria in this campaign is huge. The terrorist groups are equipped with the US-manufactured ground to air missile launchers which have been used in the past to bring down Syrian aircraft. Fire-fighting planes must necessarily fly low and slow to be most effective which makes them a relatively easy target for the Al Qaeda-linked armed groups armed by the US Coalition members.

PATRICE GREANVILLE—Non-criminal presidents are the exception—the rare exception. For no one can climb to the imperial throne without swearing allegiance to the consensual imperial policies adopted by the ruling elites, which for generations has included as its cornerstone meddling in other countries affairs, invasions and outright wars, overt and covert—all such actions regarded as the highest form of international crime by the Nuremberg court. That’s why the system’s propaganda arm —the American media and their subsidiaries abroad—has long “sacralised” the office of the president, according it the treatment of kings ordained by God. It’s cruelly ironic that after slaughtering countless millions around the world in the name of “democracy”,  America is neither a true democracy nor a republic in practice or spirit.

ED CURTIN—He tells us he didn’t wake up until he was nearly thirty-years-old – in 1976.

Ever since he has devoted his life to the art of waking up his fellow Americans through writing and filmmaking, which he had the great good fortune to learn at NYU film school from that other passionate New York filmmaker, Martin Scorsese, who was his professor.  Scorsese shone a light on Oliver after he had made a short film without dialogue called Last Year in Vietnam.  It was shown to the class, a tough group of critics, but before anyone had spoken, Scorsese said, “Well – this is a filmmaker.”  It was an epiphany that Stone says he will never forget. A pure gift that set him on his way to eventually make his great films. But the journey was hard and took years to complete.