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By Aram Mirzaei for the Saker blog Another president, another act of aggression. For the past few decades, it’s almost like a mandatory rite of passage for US presidents to bomb Muslim countries. I don’t think many of us are surprised to see that current US President Joe Biden turned out to be no different to his predecessors, when Washington once more bombed Iraqis last week. Continuing the same policy
by Pepe Escobar with permission and first posted at Asia Times In the beginning, they were the Bamiyan Buddhas: the Western Buddha statue, 55 meters high, and the Eastern, 38 meters high, carved for decades since 550 A.D. from porous sandstone cliffs, the intricate details modeled in clay mixed with straw and coated with stucco. Xuanzang, the legendary traveling monk of the early Tang dynasty who journeyed to India in
By Godfree Roberts – selected from his extensive weekly newsletter : Here Comes China plus editorial notes. You can get it here: https://www.herecomeschina.com/#subscribe The Biggest News Xi declares ‘complete victory’ in eradicating absolute poverty in China The final 99 million poor rural Chinese are free of poverty, along with 832 impoverished counties and 128,000 villages. China met the United Nations’ 2030 Sustainable Development goal 10 years ahead of schedule. (Ed…)
2021/03/02 15:30:01Welcome to the ‘Moveable Feast Cafe’. The ‘Moveable Feast’ is an open thread where readers can post wide ranging observations, articles, rants, off topic and have animate discussions of the issues of the day. The ‘Moveable Feast Cafe’ will have two new open threads each week. The Saker stated moderation policy will apply eg ‘no caps’, no obscenity … etc to all post. The Cafe is now open for
By Larry Romanoff for the Saker Blog The success of Lippman and Bernays did not go unnoticed in many segments of American society. Universities in particular realised the potential of these new propaganda techniques to form, manipulate and control social perceptions and behavior. Schools and Universities in the US had never been viewed as an educational system but more as tools of a public disciplinary system, a method both of
[This book review was written for the Unz Review] This is the third book by Andrei Martyanov that I am reviewing, the first one was “Book Review – Losing Military Supremacy: the Myopia of American Strategic Planning by Andrei Martyanov”, while the second one was “Book Review: Andrei Martyanov’s The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs”. I also interviewed Andrei about this second volume here. The book I am reviewing today,
by Ghassan and Intibah Kadi for the Saker Blog Who remembers the Herman’s Hermits and their 1967 song ‘There’s a Kind of Hush’? The hush the song speaks of is a hush of love, and it was a world of dreams in the sixties in the West, despite the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights protests in the USA and other global conflicts. The peace movements were strong and vibrant, and
By The Ister for the Saker Blog They say that great myths die hard, but as it fades into obscurity will anyone really miss the Saudi state? Because the Kingdom’s cosmopolitan elite longed to be like the West, they imported European sports cars and erected enormous skyrises using slave labor. Riyadh and Jeddah transformed into shopping centers and hubs of oligarchic largesse while the oil-rich sheiks appeased the conservative populace
Did they expect us to treat them with any respect? Roger Waters (The Final Cut) Long ago, I learned the hard way that what I call “professional ideologues” count every damn penny and I sure do NOT want you to post a full article of theirs, lest they threaten me with lawsuits (already happened twice): to them, money is far, far, more important than propagating any truths, believe me. So
By Pepe Escobar and first posted at Asia Times Moscow is painfully aware that the US/NATO “strategy” of containment of Russia is already reaching fever pitch. Again. This past Wednesday, at a very important meeting with the Federal Security Service board, President Putin laid it all out in stark terms: We are up against the so-called policy of containing Russia. This is not about competition, which is a natural thing
2021/02/27 04:00:07Welcome to the ‘Moveable Feast Cafe’. The ‘Moveable Feast’ is an open thread where readers can post wide ranging observations, articles, rants, off topic and have animate discussions of the issues of the day. The ‘Moveable Feast Cafe’ will have two new open threads each week. The Saker stated moderation policy will apply eg ‘no caps’, no obscenity … etc to all post. The Cafe is now open for
Middle East Observer Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTS8uVQl4QM Description: TV report on the strategic importance of Ma’rib province for the fate of the ongoing conflict in Yemen, particularly following reports that Sana’a-led forces were on the verge of taking control over the entire Ma’rib governate. Source: Al Maydeen TV (Important Note: Please help us keep producing independent translations for you by contributing as little as $1/month here: https://www.patreon.com/MiddleEastObserver?fan_landing=true) Transcript: Television presenter: Welcome. The Yemeni army and
Intro by the Saker: following my article on the situation in the Ukraine, I got the following email from a reader from Budapest: “You mention about how the Ukrainian government persecutes Russian speakers. In addition, they are also persecuting Hungarian speakers. They have been banning the Hungarian language, Hungarian flag, etc., and the Hungarian community has been threatened with graffiti about their extermination, typically sprayed on the Hungarian community centers,
[this analysis was written for the Unz Review] While the Ukraine has mostly been out of the news, there were bigger stories out there, things have gone disastrously wrong under “Ze” (Zelenskii) and the Ukraine is now looking at several time bombs which could explode at any minute. Here is a partial list of problems which the Ze administration will have to deal with in 2021: (in no particular order)
2021/02/23 16:30:04Welcome to the ‘Moveable Feast Cafe’. The ‘Moveable Feast’ is an open thread where readers can post wide ranging observations, articles, rants, off topic and have animate discussions of the issues of the day. The ‘Moveable Feast Cafe’ will have two new open threads each week. The Saker stated moderation policy will apply eg ‘no caps’, no obscenity … etc to all post. The Cafe is now open for
Original link: http://middleeastobserver.net/nasrallah-it-was-groups-trained-by-soleimani-that-drove-us-army-out-of-iraq-in-2011/ Description: In an extensive interview in late 2020, Hezbollah’s leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah provides a detailed explanation of the identity of the “resistance groups” that he says were responsible for militarily driving the U.S. army out of Iraq in 2011. Nasrallah explains that the overwhelming majority of the operations carried out on U.S. forces between 2003 and 2011 were carried out not by Al-Qaeda and its likes, but
by Ljubiša Malenica for the Saker Blog The abrupt dissolution of the USSR and the emergence of the United States as the sole superpower in the last decade of the twentieth century influenced both the political ordering of the world and the ideological foundation upon which said ordering relied. Where previously existed two conflicting worldviews, with their own specific characteristics, the end of the Soviet Union signaled the fall of
By Pepe Escobar with permission and first posted at Asia Times The late Dr. Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski for some time dispensed wisdom as an oracle of US foreign policy, side by side with the perennial Henry Kissinger – who, in vast swathes of the Global South, is regarded as nothing but a war criminal. Brzezinski never achieved the same notoriety. At best he claimed bragging rights for giving the
By Larry Romanoff for the Saker Blog From their experiences in the formulation, manipulation and control of public perception and opinion with the CPI, both Lippman and Bernays later wrote of their open contempt for a “malleable and hopelessly ill-informed public” in America. (1) Lippmann had already written that the people in a democracy were simply “a bewildered herd” of “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders” (2) who should be maintained only
By Godfree Roberts – selected from his extensive weekly newsletter : Here Comes China You can get it here: https://www.herecomeschina.com/#subscribe Having recently read Godfree’s latest book, Why China Rules the World, I learned about trial spots, the history of these and how basically everything that is accepted by the population, gets trialed first, by the population. We change pace on this regular sitrep and instead of bringing together a wide
