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By Edward Curtin

Whenever a “scandal” like the Epstein files dominates the news, we can be certain that it is meant as a distraction from something more sinister on the horizon.

The Epstein files have been in the hands of the F.B.I. for eight years or more. Then why have redacted files been released just recently? Cui bono?

And who is behind the release that did not occur over the course of the first Trump and the Biden administrations? Cui bono?

Does the genocide in Gaza and the U.S. proxy war against Russia, both supported by Biden and Trump, fit into the timing and redactions since we can assume that the Mossad, CIA, NSA, and MI6 have also long had access to the files? A U.S../Israel attack on Iran? For, like movies, all propaganda and coverups have carefully chosen release dates.

Last question: Why would anyone be shocked by the contents of the Epstein files, although many people seem to be? Yes, more names have been added to the list of degenerate elites who were happily part of Epstein’s criminal enterprise, but the revelation of more names only confirms how extensive it was.

We have long known of the criminal activities of the degenerate Epstein, the financiers, celebrities, politicians, and public figures who joined him. Sexual blackmail, cooperation between intelligence agencies and the underworld, secret financial deals, war planning in the name of peace, etc. are how capitalism has long operated. While those who research such things have long known this (see, e.g., Whitney Webb’s One Nation Under Blackmail, two volumes), the ordinary person may be finally grasping it; but shocking it is not. And the “may” should be emphasized. All of us have long been living in a culture of increasing “shock” rot where the most grotesque news and entertainment are staples of the mass media from Washington D.C. to Hollywood and all around the internet the monkey chased the weasel. The monkeys thought it was all in fun, and then Pop! goes the weasel.

Being shocked seems to be very popular; it spices up lives, induces that frisson that only sex, death, and the weather can bring to daily conversations. “Can you believe it?” and “Unbelievable!” echo across the land and spring from lips, screens, and websites everywhere as they invite you to come hither to be flabbergasted and have your head spun vertiginously. Ordinary people have become Regan MacNeil, the young girl possessed by a demon in The Exorcist.

If the corporate media ever went very deep, they would have to expose themselves as agents of the same forces behind Epstein’s rise to power. How often do these media connect Epstein to Israel, the Mossad, the CIA, etc.? It is not only evil individuals who rule but a structure of evil, a system, if you like, a social system deeply ingrained, publicly run currently by the evil moron Trump who, in a recent interview with The New York Times, when asked if he felt there were any limits on his global power, said, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” This statement let the cat out of the bag. It is the nihilist’s credo, basic to today’s ethos. No honor, no traditional ethical standards, no God, no love for humanity, just fake and deceptive news meant to shock and a “do your own thing,” U.S. president talking punk kid talk. Yeah. Unbelievable!. “I know words. I have the best words. I have the – but there’s no better word than stupid.” (Cue the soundtrack.)

The French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard famously said, “To make a film all you need is a girl and a gun.” Well, we have the Epstein movie, and in it he and his venal and sordid friends had the girls, but who holds the guns and not the penises behind their criminal enterprises, is left unaddressed.

When caught in flagrante, the media loves to expose certain individuals who take their pants down for sexual abuse purposes, but they find it impossible to take down those depraved villains who commit atrocities on ordinary people day in and day out throughout the world. Let’s call them the producers. They shape and pay for the news.

The Reality-TV President Donald Trump – the face of explicit imperialism and dictatorial domestic rule, a gross brutish thug whose core maxim is “might makes right” and whose name appears manifold times in the Epstein files – knows well how the game is played. After his televised fight with Zelensky last year (or was it before the fight?), he said “This is going to make great television.” So too the Epstein movie. Maybe a series.

And as in the past, none engaged in this wretched and criminal activity – except for Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell – will probably ever serve prison time. No shock there either.

As for shocks, it is better to watch the Winter Olympics and be “shocked” by favored athletes falling on ice and snow. Those falls are at least real.

There is a painting in a villa still visible at the entrance to the House of the Vettii in ruined Pompeii that tells us much about the Epstein files and power and wealth. It perfectly symbolizes one aspect of the gap between the international ruling classes – i.e. the dirty details in the Epstein documents minus the answer to who has been running the blackmail operation and why – and the rest of us. It pictures the God Priapus weighing his penis on a scale of gold coins, as if to say, gold, God, wealth, and power – we rule. Fuck you! It’s an old story told by nihilistic men desperate to prove their potency by dominating vulnerable girls and women and the entire world.

Many have been asking how is it possible for Epstein and all those named and unnamed to have done such evil and criminal things? Evil seems to greatly perplex modern intellectuals. Do they think El Diablo is a salsa brand?

Hannah Arendt’s explanation of Adolf Eichmann’s behavior – the banality of evil – is one such explanation being coughed up now for Epstein’s behavior. Others say that he had no conscience or couldn’t reason like an adult; that he wasn’t very smart but was an excellent con man. That he was a narcissist. These are superficial explanations. None get to the heart of the matter. As usual, and completely erroneously, some blame it on Nietzsche and the obermensch idea (the overman or superman). Nietzsche (like Russia) is often blamed for every modern evil by those who have internalized false notions about his work. In fact, Nietzsche warned that since men had killed God “something extraordinarily nasty and evil is about to make its debut.” He was not happy about it.

The brilliant, underrated late writer Edward Dahlberg, in an essay about Nietzsche – “The True Nietzsche” – has this to say about him: “He denounced race politics, another word for Jew-baiting, calling himself a “good European,” an “anti-anti-Semite . . . . Nothing helped; the anti-Jewish Parteigenossen presented him to the public as a Teuton Politiker.” And so he is presented to the present day, distorted for ideological purposes. One wonders who actually reads anymore.

Apropos of language usage and the degradation of understanding, Dahlberg adds, “We have made language so common that we have ceased to be symbolic readers. Unless we examine the total intellect of the poet as his text we shall misinterpret Blake or Shakespeare just as foolishly as Nietzsche has been distorted.”

To grasp words symbolically is to understand how good writers use them in their many meanings, not just literally, like spalls fallen from a scree littering a road to nowhere; but how they make them vibrate and sparkle and dip deep and fly high like luminescent birds so others may contemplate deeply and think once, twice, and maybe more.

Think of Trump’s crude use of language; think of Epstein’s; think of the culture at large. We have descended into a time of gross ignorance and our cultural decadence is reflected in the decadence of our language. Trump and Epstein reflect the larger culture in this respect. Clearly one reason for this is the internet and digital media, particularly the cell phone with its camera and text messaging. It is also an important reason for the vast and constant communication between Epstein and his “friends,” as well as the ease with which blackmail could be effected. This is no accident.

Some of us have been lucky to have experienced at a young age the rot at the heart of the system. I think of the recently deceased great journalist Michael Parenti who because of his anti-war views was blackballed out of a career in academia, but who used that experience to become a free teacher to the world.

In my early naïve twenties, I was working nights in the 42nd Police Precinct in the Bronx, interviewing arrestees in holding cells. There I learned that many were framed by the undercover cops who planted drugs on them; that the precinct had a hoard of illegal drugs for that purpose. Thinking I was his ally, one cop told me this, and that “we have to get these dirty fucking bastards off the streets (by which he meant black and Puerto Rican men). This was 4-5 years before the honest, courageous NYPD undercover cop Frank Serpico (who in later life became a friend) was set up by other cops to be shot in the face. A few years later, the movie Serpico, starring Al Pacino, was made about him.

There is always a movie.

At a school where I was teaching, a man who held a high position and whom I respected, knowing I was involved in anti-war activities, tried – to my great shock – to recruit me into Army Intelligence. These, and numerous other examples, set me on the early path of skepticism about the faces of authority. I am grateful for these early lessons.

Like all stories, the Epstein movie takes place within a larger cultural symbol system that is mythic in its dimensions. How else to explain the near ineradicable hatred for anything Russian among Americans? In the U.S. the big myth is called the American Dream, which the late George Carlin has said you have to be asleep to believe in, but which nevertheless exists, although it may be crumbling. Every society has such a symbol system. Through its stories and symbols, meanings and values are conveyed. And people live by stories, stories within stories. Myth means story.

For many decades, we have been undergoing a massive symbolic transformation in which the controlling symbolic (from Greek: to throw together) order is being replaced by its opposite, a diabolic (from Greek: to throw apart, the devil, el diablo) order with new stories to scramble people’s brains, dissociate their personalities, set them against each other, and create a general sense of uncertainty. God vs. the devil.

All power is fundamentally power to deny mortality. This is true whether it is the power of the state or church, or secret groups like Epstein’s. And it is always sacred power. Holy or perverted. Many often ask why do the super-rich and powerful always want more. It’s simple. They wish to transcend their human mortality and become gods – immortals. They stupidly believe that if they can lord it over others, kill, dominate, rape, achieve status, become billionaires, presidents, magnates, celebrities, etc., they will somehow live in some weird forever. Thus Epstein and his circle.

In a process that has spanned at least a hundred and fifty years or so, our traditional cultural/religious symbol systems have been radically undermined, most momentously by the Faustian creation of Lord Nuke. All forms of symbolic immortality (theological, biological, creative, natural, and experiential) that formerly provided a sense of continuity have been severely threatened. This is the haunting specter lurking in the background of life today.

What is death? How to defeat or transcend it? What’s God’s cell phone number? Quick. Improvise.

Little men like Epstein, and those voluntarily captured in his web, all those desperadoes with their hands in their pants, lying through their teeth as they went with Pinocchio and the Coachman to Pleasure Island . . . .

Cut!

Forget the script.

We ain’t seen nothing yet.

Edward Curtin is a writer — beyond a cage of categories.

19 February 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark

With a sex trafficking, flesh peddling empire of favours, logistics and the good time to be had by the powerful, the gigantic scale of Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal network continues to disturb. The least savoury digital library on the planet, available through the offices of the US Justice Department as the Epstein Library, is being combed through with its 3.5 million items comprising 180,000 images, 2000 videos, email and text correspondence, not to mention an assortment of miscellaneous material.

The combing process has come to displace the sheer gravity of Epstein’s dehumanising enterprise. Like a gold mine of ill-repute, slime and crime, researchers, journalists, political hacks and the purely voyeuristic are fossicking for material about the next public figure to be tainted. Agendas abound. The central agenda – ruined lives and the despoiled innocence of young women and girls, and their retraumatising with shoddily redacted files – has been eclipsed.

On February 17, a panel of United Nations experts appointed by the Human Rights Council issued a sharp statement on the Epstein files urging a return to a focus on the victims. The members include, among others, Reem Absalem, Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, its causes and consequences, George Katrougalos, independent expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, and Ana Brian Nougrères, Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy.

The documents revealed, according to the statement, “disturbing and credible evidence of systematic and large-scale sexual abuse, trafficking and exploitation of women and girls”. The panel members took note of crimes “committed against the backdrop of supremacist beliefs, racism, corruption, extreme misogyny, and the commodification and dehumanisation of women and girls from different parts of the world.” A “global criminal enterprise” had “raised terrifying implications of the level of impunity in such crimes.”

The panel further proposed that the severe nature of the crimes required stern reclassification. “So grave is the scale, nature, systematic character, and transnational reach of these atrocities against women and girls, that a number of them may reasonably meet the legal threshold of crimes against humanity.” Acts such as sexual slavery, rape, enforced prostitution, trafficking, persecution, torture or murder can fall within such a determination, and if so, would deserve prosecution in international and domestic courts.

Unfortunately, the Department of Justice shows little interest in pursuing any of those named in the files, let alone conducting genuinely impartial investigations. (Impartiality is not a strong suit of the Trump administration.) Deputy US Attorney General Todd Blanche, in dismissive remarks made early this month, observed that, “There’s a lot of correspondence. There’s a lot of emails. There’s a lot of photographs. But that doesn’t allow us necessarily to prosecute somebody.” Just because the victims wanted “to be made whole” did not “mean we can just create evidence or that we can just kind of come up with a case that isn’t there”.

The bountiful nature of the Epstein files would suggest no evidence of any sort needs to be created, with the late financier and convicted paedophile most prolific in communicating with various associates on meetings, rendezvous and logistical matters. And there is that troubling failure to disclose the remaining 3 million files or so that remain sealed.

The panel experts relevantly insist that the allegations were so “egregious in nature” as to require “independent, thorough, and impartial investigation, as well as inquiries to determine how such crimes could have taken place for so long.” States were under an obligation to prevent, investigate and punish instances of violence against women and girls, including inflicted by private perpetrators.

Strong words were also reserved for the slipshod process of disclosure that left unredacted the identities and details of a multitude of victims while sparing the powerful, participating members of Club Epstein. “The grave errors in the release process underscore the urgent need for victim-centered standard operating procedures for disclosure and redaction, so that no victim suffers further harm.” That ship had sailed well before, given the utter lack of interest shown by the DOJ in involving victims in the process. Six survivors in a September 2025 interview confirmed that fact.

In the view of the panel, failing “to safeguard [the victims’] privacy puts them at risk of retaliation and stigma. The reluctance to fully disclose information or broaden investigations, has left many survivors feeling retraumatised and subjected to what they describe as ‘institutional gaslighting’.”

To date, promised investigations, such as those into former UK ambassador to Washington Lord Peter Mandelson, focus less on the victims than commercially and politically sensitive information he allegedly disclosed to Epstein when occupying public office. The standard formula used by those trapped in the web has been the fool’s defence, the implausible bliss of ignorance. There have been resignations aplenty, and cataracts of apology.

The UN panel had harsh words for such woeful responses, insisting on a few courses of action. Lift the statute of limitations preventing the prosecution for grave crimes linked to the Epstein enterprise. Provide full remedies and reparations for the victims. Government failures to “effectively investigate, and prosecute those responsible for these crimes, including by complicity or acquiescence, where jurisdiction exists, risks undermining legal frameworks aimed at preventing and responding to violence against women and girls.”

The Trump era of crude, vulgar might as the sole indicator of worth does not augur well for human rights advocates demanding investigations and prosecutions into the victims of Epstein’s predation. Even before President Donald Trump got the keys to the White House, there was impunity, complicity and permissiveness in the depravities of Club Epstein, a state of affairs tolerated, even encouraged by a ruling class bankrupted and soiled. If you were not in it, as the reprehensible socialite Lady Victoria Hervey scorned, you were a “loser”.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.

19 February 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Biljana Vankovska

These days, I find myself thinking of a character from the old Yugoslav partisan film Battle of Sutjeska. The film is dedicated to the heroic battle and Tito’s brilliant tactical maneuver to extricate the surrounded partisan units. However, that is not my subject here, even if we are now speaking of a far greater encirclement tightening around humanity. In one scene, the young nurse Dana tries to help her fallen comrades. They are dropping one by one. Cries come from all sides: “Dana, here!” “Dana, help!”. She is frantic. She does not know where to turn first, unable to save the mortally wounded. It may sound pretentious, but I increasingly identify with that role, even if only as an intellectual who does not heal, yet jumps from one end of the world to the other. If I cannot help, I can at least speak, raise the alarm… But what out of that? What can our written words truly accomplish? As if Gaza were not enough to awaken the conscience (by the way I served as a juror at the Jury of Conscience at the Gaza Tribunal last October)… We leap like Dana from one place to another, trying to draw attention, to warn of new genocides (Sudan, Congo), new military interventions (Iran), kidnappings of legitimate politicians (Venezuela), tariffs and secondary sanctions – all illegal … The political elites don’t give a damn.

While waiting for something to “explode” in Iran, we warn of possible escalation, as if Gaza were slipping into the background. And yet people are dying there even while the so-called Trump Peace Board is being discussed. Then Venezuela erupts with scenes straight out of an American action film: not only the president abducted, but his wife as well. An American court postures as an institution dispensing justice over a foreign statesman, while the Epstein files generate more interest and debate (especially the disappointment surrounding Chomsky and others) than the ongoing crimes against children, the elderly, the prisoners, and the sick. Are our personal disillusionments and misjudgments truly more important than what is happening on the ground?

Behind all the evils of this world stands a single superpower — the United States; everyone knows it, yet no one can restrain it. What follows are merely words of moral condemnation and political support for those subjected to its various methods of killing. This is not surprising; the cult of death in the U.S. has a bizarre imagination. One need only look at crime series such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation — in all their versions — to see the countless ways a human being can be killed. But the state (political, military and corporate power combined) has perfected this imagination on entire nations and states. They fall one after another like dominoes, and no one so much as lifts a finger. We have both classical and non-classical methods of destroying a state. Yet today, the most ‘modern’ are genocide, strangulation, and wars of attrition — all to plunder, eliminate the indigenous population, and strip it of agency (sovereignty).

A few years ago, a colleague from Belgrade who had just returned from a holiday in Cuba told me: if you intend to see that beautiful country, hurry. Yesterday, at our regular weekly meeting with comrades from No Cold War, Cuba was our first agenda item. Our comrade Gisela said something that echoed in my mind for hours afterward: genocidal blockade. Indeed, it is easy to indulge in the belief that those with whom we express solidarity are brave, stronger than everything, survivors of many past ordeals — our inspiration. But the images from the ground are not sobering; they are shocking: paralysis of the entire country is expected, hunger, disease (in a country with an extraordinary healthcare system — what irony!). In truth, Cuba has long been on its knees; we are merely waiting for an even more extreme act by the U.S. before we pay attention. (Much as with Iran, Syria, or any other country…) For more than sixty years, it has lived under siege, only now the rope around its neck is tightening. Marco Rubio confirms the old Balkan saying, “Worse the convert than the Turk.” (In English, one could say: there is no zealot like a convert). Born to Cuban parents, he has become an advocate of the glory of the conquistadors and American predators, who cannot tolerate resistance or the offer of a society different from their own, which is sick to its roots. His Munich speech was fit for the heirs of neo-Nazism and neocolonialism; yet worse than the words spoken was the applause of the Europeans.

I will be blunt in conclusion (for we have had enough of wise analyses and verbal acrobatics). First, I am ashamed of my country, which does not even mention the name Gaza (not even accidentally); so sanitized is its subservient rhetoric before the master. Until last year, at least formally, it raised its hand in the UN General Assembly to call for the lifting of the illegal sanctions on Cuba. We stood with the overwhelming majority (even if everyone knows that such symbolic voting is futile). But in October 2025, we became more American than the Americans, placing ourselves among only SEVEN states that voted to maintain the sanctions. Some of us spoke out: shameful! And that was it. Even “Dana” had other issues to address in her writings. Our president continues to pose with children, as befits a kindly granny, yet gives no thought to the children of Gaza or Cuba. She remains silent and enjoys sessions in which she proclaims that “storks do not bring babies” — without mentioning who kills babies.

Recently, in a close intellectual circle, we discussed the unenviable position of Venezuela’s acting president and the necessity of negotiating with the Empire. A comrade, a courageous and inspiring man, said something that froze my blood. In trying to help us grasp the situation of total dependency and threats against the innocent, he said: “They do not want Venezuela to become a new Gaza.” And now, when we speak of Cuba, a similar parallel is drawn. If one does not negotiate with the naked and enraged Emperor, he will turn Cuba into a new Gaza for its eleven million inhabitants. Iran has been suffering for decades. Is it just a different form of killing a nation?

What does international solidarity mean today, when fear has been driven into everyone’s bones? Each state looks to its own vital and national — primarily economic — interests. What of BRICS? Is it a mirage, part of our wishful thinking? Do they not see that the empire’s sword is severing the arteries of the Global Majority at all the key points of the world? Will they continue to whisper: let it not become worse, we will endure. To paraphrase Dante, you who expect an alternative world, abandon all hope. Until the countries of the Global Majority recognize that the epicenter of the new fascism has shifted from Europe to North America, they will not form a genuine anti-fascist alliance –or at least, an alliance that would resist spreading barbarity.

Biljana Vankovska is a professor of political science and international relations at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, a member of the Transnational Foundation of Peace and Future Research (TFF) in Lund, Sweden, and the most influential public intellectual in Macedonia.

19 February 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Ali Asghar

Hamas is an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya (Islamic Resistance Movement).It emerged in 1987 during the First Intifada as an Islamist alternative to the secular Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). From a grassroots social movement it evolved into a dominant political and military force in Palestinian society. Its transformation reflects the complexities of Palestinian politics, the interplay with Israeli strategies, and the shifting dynamics of the broader Middle East. The evolution of Hamas from a social movement to a resistance force can be traced through several phases. Let us examine these phases to understand how the increasing atrocities of the Israel forced a social movement to transform itself into resistance and militant organisation.

The roots of Hamas lie in the Muslim Brotherhood’s activities in Gaza and the West Bank. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Brotherhood focused on dawa (Islamic outreach and social work). This phase was characterized by establishment of mosques, schools, clinics, and charities that provided essential services to the Palestinian population, often filling gaps left by the Israeli occupation and the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). During this period, Israeli authorities permitted the expansion of Islamist social institutions, viewing them as a counterweight to the PLO, which, due to its armed resistance and broader international support was considered as a great threat. As a counter to PLO Israeli authorities often permitted or even encouraged the growth of Islamist organizations, believing their focus on social work and religious activities would undermine the PLO’s influence. As PLO’s authority started to decline during the later 1980s, it created a political vaccum that Hamas was well positioned to exploit. PLO’s leadership got expelled from Lebanon in 1982 and was exiled in Tunisia. This caused it to get increasingly disconnected from daily realities in the occupied territories. This got exacerbated through increasing corruption, inefficiency and internal divisions within the PLO which further eroded its standing amongst the ordinary Palestinians. As the faith of common Palestinians in secular nationalism waned, increasing numbers started to turn towards Islamism as a more authentic and responsive framework for resistance and social organization. This period was also marked by worsening economic and social conditions for Palestinians due to increasing Israeli restrictions, economic stagnation and rising unemployment creating widespread hardship. Resentment and disillusionment got further fuelled by the absence of effective governance and increasing poverty. In this context, Hamas’s social services and message of religiously inspired resistance resonated even more strongly with the population.

These factors along with the growing suffering of people eventually led to the outbreak of the First Intifada in December 1987. This was a watershed moment, as it brought Hamas to the forefront as a leader of resistance. Hamas quickly moved beyond social work, establishing a military wing and engaging in armed struggle against Israeli forces and collaborators. In 1988, Hamas issued its foundational Covenant, formally declaring its commitment to the liberation of all historic Palestine through jihad and its opposition to any negotiated settlement with Israel. The Covenant combined Islamist ideology with Palestinian nationalism, rejecting both the PLO’s secularism and the possibility of compromise.

The 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO generated hopes for a negotiated settlement but left core issues unresolved. Continued settlement growth and persistent restrictions by Israel led many Palestinians to question the effectiveness of diplomacy. Hamas positioned itself as the principal opponent of the peace process and intensified attacks inside Israel during the mid-1990s.

The Second Intifada (2000–2005) deepened polarization. Israeli military incursions, targeted killings, and the construction of the separation barrier coincided with Hamas-led suicide bombings and other attacks. The cycle of violence weakened moderate actors and strengthened factions advocating uncompromising resistance. Hamas gained significant popularity by adopting suicide bombings, often targeting Israeli civilians, in response to Israeli military actions, which killed over 1,000 Israeli soldiers and 3,000 Palestinian civilians

In 2006, Hamas won Palestinian legislative elections, capitalizing on dissatisfaction with corruption and stagnation within the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority. After violent clashes with Fatah, Hamas consolidated control over Gaza in 2007. Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade on the territory, citing security concerns. Repeated wars between Israel and Hamas since 2008 have caused significant civilian casualties and infrastructure damage, while rocket attacks from Gaza have targeted Israeli communities.

Under these conditions, Hamas evolved into a hybrid actor: simultaneously a governing authority, a social movement, and an armed organization. The blockade and recurring conflicts reinforced its narrative of resistance, even as governance responsibilities exposed it to criticism.

Hamas’s trajectory shares similarities with several other movements that combined social services, political participation, and armed struggle:

Hezbollah (Lebanon): Like Hamas, Hezbollah began as a social movement providing social services within a marginalized community while engaging in armed resistance against a foreign military presence. Both developed disciplined military wings alongside political structures. However, Hezbollah operates within a recognized state and participates formally in national government, whereas Hamas governs a territorially fragmented and internationally isolated enclave.

Irish Republican Army (IRA): The IRA and its political wing, Sinn Féin, illustrate how armed struggle can coexist with electoral politics. As with Hamas, imprisonment, security crackdowns, and contested sovereignty fueled support for militancy. Yet the Irish peace process ultimately integrated militants into a negotiated settlement, a transition Hamas has not undertaken in comparable form.

African National Congress (ANC): The ANC combined mass mobilization, international diplomacy, and limited armed struggle against apartheid South Africa. Unlike Hamas, the ANC increasingly prioritized global legitimacy and sanctions-based pressure, culminating in a negotiated transition. Hamas has remained more firmly rooted in a strategy that foregrounds armed resistance.

Across cases, several common patterns emerge: prolonged conflict environments, perceived failure of moderate leadership, grassroots social networks, and state repression often contribute to the radicalization and legitimization of armed movements. Differences arise in ideological framing, international recognition, and willingness or capacity to transition from militancy to negotiated compromise.

Hamas’s evolution reflects the interaction of occupation structures, political fragmentation, ideological mobilization, and recurring violence. Israeli security policies, internal Palestinian rivalries, the shortcomings of diplomatic initiatives, and regional instability all contributed to shaping the movement’s development.

Like many resistance movements, Hamas emerged from social activism, gained legitimacy amid conflict, institutionalized armed struggle, and later assumed governing responsibilities. Its trajectory underscores how protracted conflicts can produce hybrid actors that blend welfare provision, political participation, and militancy—entrenching cycles of confrontation that become increasingly difficult to resolve.

Ali Asghar is a social activist committed to community development, communal harmony, and social justice.

19 February 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor

FIFA President Infantino and UEFA President Čeferin have been accused of aiding and abetting war crimes (specifically, the transfer of civilian population into occupied territories) and crimes against humanity (specifically, apartheid) under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Communication was formally filed with the ICC Office of the Prosecutor on 16 February 2026.

Illegal settlement clubs
The complaint centres on FIFA and UEFA’s inclusion of Israeli football clubs based in illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian territory that were built on land stolen from Palestinian people. FIFA and UEFA permit these clubs to play in leagues organised by the Israel Football Association and host matches on the seized land. They also provide financial and structural support to settlement clubs, some of which have played in the UEFA-organised competitions.

Legitimisation of illegal occupation
In addition to being in breach of FIFA and UEFA Statutes, this practice normalises life in the settlements and legitimises Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine, contributing to the transfer of civilian population into occupied territories contrary to the Rome Statute art 8(2)(b)(viii). The practice also aids and abets apartheid (a crime against humanity pursuant to Rome Statute art 7(1)(j)) – Palestinians are not allowed to enter the matches as spectators, play for, or become managers of, the illegal settlement clubs. Settlements are a part of the Israeli government’s colonial project and UEFA and FIFA’s policies under the political leadership of their Presidents assist with the conduct of these criminal activities.

Disregarding human rights reports
The Presidents of FIFA and UEFA have acted in full knowledge that these practices constitute the commission of human rights violations, apartheid, and war crimes, and have ignored multiple reports and letters addressed to them by UN human rights experts, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Members of the European Parliament, among many others.

Political interference
Evidence also demonstrates that the Presidents of UEFA and FIFA cooperated with the highest levels of the Israeli and US governments to facilitate the continued participation of Israel FA and settlement clubs, and to shield them from accountability. Instead of applying FIFA Statutes and expelling the settlement clubs, Mr Infantino has led FIFA in suppressing all efforts of the Palestine Football Association to regain legal and political jurisdiction over their territory. He also ignored the warning of FIFA’s Israel-Palestine Monitoring Committee that maintaining the status quo lacked international legitimacy and disregarded its recommendation to expel settlement clubs or sanction the Israel Football Association. Under the political leadership of Mr Čeferin, UEFA has effectively extended its own territory and administrative jurisdiction into the occupied Palestine – i.e., into areas falling under the jurisdiction of Palestine Football Association and thus the Asian Football Confederation.

Lawyers behind the complaint consider that “this is an excellent opportunity for the ICC to set a much-needed precedent. FIFA and UEFA are powerful private regulatory monopolies performing quasi-public functions with revenues that exceed the GDP of many countries in the world. These global corporations are operating with impunity and there are no effective internal or external accountability mechanisms for them or their leaders for violations of human rights and international law.”

Filing parties submitted a 120-page filing and evidence to the Office of Prosecutor of the ICC on 16 of February. The Submitting Parties include a group of Palestinian footballers, Palestinian clubs, owners of the land, a human rights organisation in Palestine, and advocacy groups: Irish Sport for Palestine, Scottish Sport for Palestine, Just Peace Advocates, Sport Scholars for Justice in Palestine, and Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor is a Geneva-based independent organization with regional offices across the MENA region and Europe

19 February 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Quds News Network

Last week, just few metres from yellow-painted concrete blocks which Israeli forces put to mark their latest redeployment line, Shimaa Ali was preparing breakfast for her four-member family: her husband, her two children Amer and Tala, and Zomorroda, their long-time pet cat.

Suddenly, they heard Israeli tanks approaching. Within seconds, the tanks began firing randomly and intensely at the buildings that remain after two years of genocide.

The children started screaming as the tanks had stationed themselves near their partially destroyed home, and bullets penetrated the walls and the plastic sheets the family had put up for protection.

“It was not the first time, nor will it be the last,” Shimaa told Quds News Network from their home in eastern Al-Maghazi camp in central Gaza. The house is located near the so-called “Yellow Line.”

“We live on the upper floor, but because of the Israeli attacks, the stairs were destroyed, so we have no proper way to reach the ground,” she explained.

When Israeli forces approached that day, the family was unable to flee. Neighbors eventually brought them a ladder so they could climb down and escape.

“Within a minute, the forces were near us, and within five minutes we were outside the house while Israeli bullets were about to hit us,” she said.

Shimaa described this as a “run for your life or die game — if you don’t run, or if you don’t have the time, you will be absolutely killed.”

The mother of two said the Israeli forces know the family is inside the house, yet they continue to target it.

“When we leave the house, they stop shooting. When we are inside, they shoot intensively,” she said. “A quadcopter once came and ordered us to leave immediately, but they gave us no time to flee and were shooting at us at the same time.”

What Is the “Yellow Line?

On October 10, 2025, the Israeli forces completed the first phase of withdrawal under the ceasefire deal to the “Yellow Line,” a non-physical demarcation line separating the Israeli occupation forces from certain areas of Gaza, while occupying roughly 53 percent of the Strip.

The “Yellow Line” refers to Israeli-designated military zones and buffer areas inside the Gaza Strip.

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said anyone remaining beyond the yellow line would be targeted without warning.

According to an Israeli map presented under US President Donald Trump’s 20-point Gaza ceasefire plan, the yellow line extends from south of northern Gaza down to the outskirts of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.

Israeli forces remain deployed in the Shejaiya neighborhood, parts of the Tuffah and Zeitoun in Gaza City, as well as in Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya in the north, Rafah in the south, and along the Gaza coast.

So, the line divides Gaza into two zones: an eastern area under Israeli military control and a western area where Palestinians live, were forcibly displaced to, and are under constant Israeli threat of attacks.

The Israeli forces directly open fire on any Palestinians crossing this “Yellow Line” or even approaching, without prior warning.

Palestinians returning to their destroyed homes amid the ceasefire have been attacked by the Israeli forces near the line.

The Israeli military said it placed yellow concrete blocks to mark the imaginary boundary, a line, for Palestinians, that separates between life and death.

According to the Israeli military Spokesperson, “The marking is being carried out on concrete barriers topped with a yellow-painted post standing 3.5 meters (11.5 feet) above the ground,” adding that concrete barriers are “being placed every 200 meters.”

Israeli military maps indicate the line extends 1.5km and 6.5km (0.9 to 4 miles) inside Gaza from its eastern boundary with Israel and covers roughly 58 percent of the enclave.

During a visit to the Gaza Strip in December, the Israeli military’s chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, said unequivocally that the “Yellow Line” is “a new border line”.

This imaginary line decides which streets and areas are safe and when it’s time to run. According to UN agencies, humanitarian organizations operating in Gaza and satellite images, Israeli forces have been extending the “Yellow Line” into the areas under Palestinian control.

Israel has no plans to withdraw from the “Yellow Line” in the eastern Gaza Strip. This was announced on the “This Morning” program with Ilael Shahar, on Channel 2’s News, last month.

The Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation, known as Kan, also reported that Israeli officials consider the so-called “Yellow Line” as a strategic area that will remain under Israeli control.

What Life Looks Like Near the ‘Yellow Line’

Shimaa’s home stands amid the ruins of neighboring houses and ruined lands. As she spoke, the sound of drones could be heard overhead, while tanks were stationed near the yellow-painted barriers.

Tala, Shimaa’s daughter, said she “frequently wakes up to the sound of intense gunfire or explosions. We know it is morning from their daily shooting, at 6 a.m., they start firing.”

At night, the family fears turning on any lights, worried they could be targeted or provoke the forces stationed nearby. “There is no safety in Gaza,” Shimaa said. Her son Amer is also afraid to go to the bathroom in complete darkness, she added, with drones continuing to buzz overhead.

Shimaa said their home is at constant risk, as Israeli forces carry out weekly attacks on people near the line.

Amer always tells Tala not to open the curtains, so the soldiers won’t notice her and target them at any moment. He told Quds News Network that living near the line is like really being in a game: there are rules and instructions you must follow to survive. “We know which areas of the house to avoid, where to hide, and when it’s safe to go to the bathroom or take a quick shower, if we even get the chance,” he said.

Images obtained by Quds News Network from the family show dozens of bullet holes piercing the walls.

Shimaa noted that such living near the line has fueled anxiety, exhaustion and deep trauma for her children.

She said Amer has ear pain from the constant, intense gunfire and explosions nearby. Aid organizations have noted that living near military zones can have long-term psychological effects.

On one occasion, Amer narrowly escaped death when a bullet struck the plastic sheet near him.

Tala, who attends school in the other part of the camp, said she struggles to focus on her studies. “I sleep in fear and wake up thanking God that we are alive. I can’t sleep because of the sounds of drones and gunfire… I wake up exhausted every day,” she said.

The family said that what remains of their home after two years of assault is being destroyed daily by Israeli forces. “The fire damaged the water tank, and now we don’t have water or electricity,” Shimaa said.

When asked if they are always ready to flee, Tala explained that they keep their belongings packed in bags. “Whenever we are at direct risk and see the Israeli tanks approaching, we immediately flee with them,” she said. “We spend about four days in the house and the rest of the week taking shelter elsewhere.”

Amer said, “We don’t even cook. We only have quick meals, sandwiches, because of the risk.”

“We don’t dare to light a fire for cooking or hang out the laundry or open the windows. We just gather in a room that faces west, because the forces are to the east, to protect ourselves”.

“Even Zomorroda, the family’s cat, appears to sense the tanks approaching at least a minute before they arrive,” Tala said, noting that the animal begins pacing, twitching her ears, and staring intently as the sounds draw nearer.

Israeli Violations: No Ceasefire

Since the ceasefire was signed on October 10, Israel has violated it more than 1620 times, with numerous airstrikes, shootings, home demolitions and abductions.

According to the Palestinian Health Ministry this week, over 600 Palestinians have been killed and about 1,600 others injured since the ceasefire began.

Among the victims were 292 children, women and elders, and 99 percent of those killed were civilians, according to the Gaza Government Media Office.

A total of more than 72,000 have been killed by Israel in Gaza since its genocidal war began in October 2023, the Ministry added.

Israel has also restricted the entry of much-needed aid into the enclave, including shelter materials, medicine and fuel.

According to Amer, 13 years old, “This is not fair. This is not a life. The war has not ended, and Israel is lying to the world.”

19 February 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Vijay Prashad

In January 2026, US President Donald Trump declared Cuba to be an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to US security—a designation that allows the United States government to use sweeping economic restrictions traditionally reserved for national security adversaries. The US blockade against Cuba began in the 1960s, right after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 but has tightened over the years. Without any mandate from the United Nations Security Council—which permits sanctions under strict conditions—the United States has operated an illegal, unilateral blockade that tries to force countries from around the world to stop doing basic commerce with Cuba. The new restrictions focus on oil. The United States government has threatened tariffs and sanctions on any country that sells or transports oil to Cuba.

On 3 January, the United States attacked Venezuela and kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro Moros and National Assembly deputy Cillia Flores. As 150 US military aircraft sat above Caracas, the United States informed the Venezuelan government that if they did not concede to a list of demands, the US would essentially convert downtown Caracas to Gaza City. The remainder of the government, with no leverage in the conversation, had to effectively make a tactical compromise and accept the US demands. One of these demands was that Venezuela cease to export oil to Cuba. In 2025, Venezuela contributed about 34 percent of Cuba’s total oil demand. With Venezuelan oil out of the picture in the short run, Cuba already anticipated a serious problem.

But this was not all. Mexico supplied 44 percent of Cuba’s imported crude oil in 2025. Pressure now mounted from Washington on Mexico City to cease its oil exports to Cuba, which would then mean that almost 80 percent of Cuba’s oil imports would disappear. In a phone call between Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum and Trump, he claimed that he told her to stop selling oil to Cuba, but she denied that, saying that the two presidents only talked in broad terms about US-Mexico relations. Either way, the pressure on Mexico to stop its oil shipments has been considerable. Sheinbaum has stressed that Mexico must be permitted to make sovereign decisions and that the Mexican people will not buckle under US pressure. Cutting fuel to Cuba would cause a humanitarian crisis, so Sheinbaum said her government would not accept the Trump demand.

Trump’s savage policy has effectively cut off much of Cuba’s oil imports, which has created a major energy crisis on the island of eleven million people. There are rolling blackouts, fuel shortages for hospitals, water systems, and transportation, and rationing of electricity. Due to the lack of aviation fuel, several commercial airlines—such as Air Canada—have stopped their flights to Havana.

The United Nations has warned that the US pressure campaign—especially the policy to target fuel—threatens Cuba’s food and water supplies, hospitals, schools, and basic services. UN officials, including the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Cuba, have condemned the US tightening of the blockade as a measure that directly harms ordinary citizens. They pointed out that restrictions make it harder for hospitals to obtain essential medicines, dialysis clinics to operate, and medical equipment to reach patients, worsening the health crisis on the island. The Special Rapporteur described the policy as “punitive and disproportionate”, emphasising that it violates international law and deepens socio-economic hardships. The UN has urged the United States to lift sanctions and prioritise humanitarian exemptions, stressing that dialogue and cooperation—not coercive measures—are necessary to protect Cuban lives and human rights.

A group of United Nations human rights experts condemned Trump’s executive order as a “serious violation of international law” and “a grave threat to a democratic and equitable international order.” They argued that Trump’s order seeks to coerce Cuba and third states by threatening trade sanctions, and that such extraterritorial economic measures risk causing severe humanitarian consequences. Their statement made it clear that no right under international law permits a State to impose economic penalties on third States for lawful trade relations, and they called on the Trump administration to rescind the illegal order. The UN General Assembly has voted overwhelmingly against the blockade every year since 1992, often with only the US and Israel opposed.

The Blockade by the US has had a grave impact on Cuba’s development paradigm. Since the start of the Blockade over sixty years ago, the US has cost Cuba $171 billion or if adjusted for the price of gold, $2.10 trillion. Between March 2024 and February 2025, the Cuban government estimates that the Blockade caused about $7.5 billion in damages, a 49 percent increase since the previous period. If you take the $171 billion number, the Cuban people lose $20.7 million per day or $862,568 per hour. These losses are grievous for a small country that attempts to build a rational society rooted in socialist values.

Response from Havana

Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel has strongly condemned the tightened US measures as an ‘economic war’ and has argued that the US policy is designed to weaken Cuba’s sovereignty. The government calls this an “energy blockade” and emphasises that the shortages on the island are a direct result of US coercive policies. In reaction, the Cuban Revolution has implemented emergency plans, including fuel rationing to prioritise essential services such as hospitals, water systems, and public transportation. Cuba has also announced state directives to manage diminished energy supplies, including shifts toward alternative and renewable energy sources where feasible. The Chinese government has donated equipment for large-scale solar parks to be built in Artemisa, Granma, Guantánamo, Holguín, Las Tunas, and Pinar del Río. In the long-term, China will assist Cuba to build 92 solar farms to add 2,000 megawatts of solar capacity. To assist households in remote areas, the Chinese government has sent 5,000 solar kits for rooftop energy harvesting. Fuel from Mexico and Russia, as well as other countries is now on the way to Cuba. Trump’s policy of isolation has not fully succeeded.

The Cuban government said that it is in touch with Washington, but not holding direct high-level talks yet. President Díaz-Canel has said that his government would speak to the United States but only under three important conditions. First, that the dialogue will be respectful, serious, and without pressure or preconditions. Second, that the dialogue must respect Cuba’s sovereignty, independence, and political system. And finally, that the Cuban government is unwilling to negotiate the Cuban Constitution (recently revised in 2019) or Cuba’s commitment to socialism. If the United States insists on a discussion on any of these three issues, there will be no dialogue. The Cuban Revolution’s defiance on these issues is rooted in its history—since the Revolution itself was an act of defiance against the US claim on its control over the Western Hemisphere through the 1823 Monroe Doctrine (now renewed by Trump in 2025 with his Corollary). This defiance has been contagious, building a Latin American resistance to US imperialism from the 1960s to the present—including at the heart of the Bolivarian process in Venezuela.

The Angry Tide

Latin America is going through a rapid and dangerous transformation. Country after country—from Argentina to El Salvador—have elected to power political formations from the Far Right of a Special Type. These are leaders who have committed themselves to strong conservative social values (rooted in the growth of reactionary Evangelical Christianity across the Americas), to a ruthless attack on the poor through a war on crime (shaped by a theory that calls for the arrest of any potential criminals and their incarceration, a policy pioneered by El Salvador’s Nabil Bukele), and by a sharply turn toward Western Civilisation that includes an orientation towards the United States and against China (this sentiment oscillates from a celebration of Western culture to a hatred of communism). The emergence of the Far Right of a Special Type appears as if it will be in charge for a generation if it can erase the left from power in Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Venezuela (in Brazil, this Right has already taken charge of the legislature).

The parallel attacks on Venezuela and Cuba are part of the United States’s contribution to this rise of the Angry Tide across the Americas. Trump and his cronies would like to install their kind of leaders—such as Javier Milei—across the Americas as part of the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. It is this that revives the idea of sovereignty in the Americas. When the Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny ended his performance at the US Super Bowl with a celebration of all the countries in the Americas, and when he named each of them, that gesture was itself part of the battle over the idea of sovereignty.

The Cuban Revolution holds out against US imperialism, but under great pressure. Solidarity with Cuba is for the Cuban people, for the Cuban Revolution, for the reality of sovereignty across the Americas, and for the idea of socialism in the world. This is now the frontline of the fight against imperialism.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist.

19 February 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Gerald A. Perreira

Donald Trump and the Prince of Darkness, Marco Rubio, are now inflicting the unthinkable on Cuba – an embargo that deprives the Cuban people of vital petroleum and gas products that fuel a modern society’s ability to function. This is an immoral, illegal and ruthless attempt to deal a final death blow to Cuba, following 67 years of relentless US economic sanctions, blockades, sabotage and attempted regime change operations. The intention is to force this island nation to its knees. The question is, will the world allow Cuba, which has become a symbol of human dignity and resistance, refusing against all odds to surrender their inalienable right to self-determination and true independence, to fall. This current embargo threatens the very ability of Cuban society to function and provide vital services to their citizens and in so doing is life threatening. As such, it constitutes a form of genocide.

There is only one way to break this embargo and that is for every nation in the Caribbean, Central and South America, and indeed worldwide, or at least the majority of nations, to simply refuse to comply with this barbarism. Unfortunately, Caribbean governments, with a few exceptions, have chosen instead to cower in the face of US bullyism and to relinquish what little is left of our sovereignty and self-respect. Their cowardice is sickening.

Guyana’s President Irfaan Ali and his People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) government have completely capitulated to US pressure, remaining silent about the fuel embargo and the Cuban Medical Brigade’s departure from Guyana. The Brigade left recently of their own accord, since the other option was for them to be asked to leave, literally expelled.

Imagine, a political party founded by the late Dr. Cheddi Jagan, a self-professed Marxist-Leninist and devout anti-imperialist, could find itself complicit in this attempt to bring the Cuban revolution to its knees. It is shameful and tragic beyond all measure, especially since Cuba has provided vital assistance to Guyana for decades.

Cuba started sending medical brigades to Guyana in 1978, and these brigades are credited for rescuing Guyana’s healthcare system from collapse and literally saving thousands of Guyanese lives. Additionally, over the years, Cuba has provided hundreds of scholarships to Guyanese citizens to study medicine, veterinary medicine, marine engineering and architecture, economics and agriculture. Imagine betraying Cuba, which despite a 67-year unjust and unlawful US blockade, and the unbearable pressure that blockade brought to bear, put its own country and citizens at risk to fight the forces of the South African Apartheid Regime at Cuito Cuanavale in Angola, a battle that Nelson Mandela credited with dealing the final blow to the Apartheid Regime in South Africa.

At a joint sitting of his country’s National Assembly in honour of President Irfaan Ali’s recent State visit to Belize, Prime Minister Briceño called for immediate talks to prevent the impending humanitarian crisis:

“We call for urgent good faith talks to avert a humanitarian crisis which is likely to emerge in the Republic of Cuba if there is ever decreasing deliveries of petroleum products. A manufactured humanitarian disaster is neither moral nor is it legal…the government of Belize stands in full solidarity with the Cuban people.”

Despite Prime Minister Briceño pointed comments prior to President Ali’s address to the Belize National Assembly, which begged a response, President Ali, much to everyone’s surprise, did not make mention of Cuba’s impending humanitarian crisis,

I recently published an article titled Guyana: A Pawn of US Imperialism. However, the Government of Guyana turning its back on Cuba at this crucial moment in Cuba’s history is so shocking that to my mind it goes beyond the category of pawn and enters a whole new realm.

President Irfaan Ali and his administration are now showing us that they have in fact taken on the very characteristics of their foreign masters. Indeed, it seems that Guyana, just like the USA, “has no permanent friends, no permanent enemies, only permanent interests”. To turn your back on Cuba at this moment and allow the Cuban Medical Brigade to leave Guyana without uttering a word, means that you lack any quality that can admit you to what we might refer to as civilized human behaviour, that you have become no different to the foreign masters you serve. Those same foreign masters who have enabled a genocide in the open-air concentration camp of Gaza and are systematically starving women and children to death before our eyes.

Minister of Health, Dr. Frank Anthony, recently attempted to deny that the Government’s decision to end the work of the Cuban Medical Brigade in Guyana was due to US pressure. If that were so, why would we be ending this program, which is so clearly beneficial to all Guyanese, all of a sudden, out of the blue, after 48 years of service, and at exactly the same time as the US is targeting Cuba? Perhaps Dr. Frank Anthony was so ashamed of his government’s actions that he simply could not bear to admit to this shocking betrayal.

Indeed, Guyana’s Government has migrated from pawns of imperialism to becoming indistinguishable from their foreign masters. The slave master of yester-year used to create what was referred to as “drivers” or supervisors on the plantations from the enslaved populations. To inculcate in them the repressive characteristics necessary, they used fear and intimidation and took practical steps to ensure that bit by bit they lost their souls, their very humanity, just like their masters. An important part of this process was to get these African supervisors to brutally whip and torture their own, sometimes to death. The US is doing the same with the PPP/C government in Guyana and other governments in the region.

And for what? What is their excuse? Like the enslaved of yester-year who took the whip when they knew it was wrong, and whipped and tortured their own brothers and sisters, the answer is simple: to survive. To survive as factotums of the Empire. Those enslaved Africans that complied, did so because they had a gun to their head and they lacked the courage to resist. Exactly what is happening in Guyana today.
Guyana is a neo-plantation and those who hold office here are nothing more than supervisors for foreign masters. Selected for their compliance.

Their excuses whispered behind closed doors are pathetic. They know this is wrong, but what can they do, the situation is very complex, and their hands are tied, we have no choice, Guyana has a lot to lose blah blah. My response is simple: There is always a choice. Guyana has already lost everything; it is a captured state. We have lost our sovereignty, our God-given right to self-determination, our precious natural resources and wealth, our human dignity, and now we are being asked to turn our back on a sister nation that has given us so much over the past 48 years, despite being under an economic blockade themselves and severe pressure. So indeed, we are losing all that makes us human. It is called selling your soul. Bob Marley said it plain, inspired by the Biblical verse Mark 8:36, “Don’t gain the world and lose your soul, wisdom is better than silver or gold“.

Delusional Ramblings

Trump Administration claims that Cuba presents an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the national security of the US and supports “transnational terrorist groups” has no basis in reality, similar to the accusations that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro headed a Cartel de los Soles, a drug cartel that did not exist. A fact check can substantiate that the most “unusual and extraordinary threat” to not only the US, but to the entire world, is currently the Trump Administration. Not least of all because of their shameless spreading of disinformation, outright lies, in an attempt to justify their tyranny and terrorism. However, even more worrying is their seeming loss of contact with reality, where they appear to believe their own hype. This phenomenon is usually associated with psychosis, where the brain struggles to differentiate between what is real and what is imagined, resulting in distorted perceptions, thoughts, and behaviours.

As it becomes increasingly obvious to the world that we are witnessing the now inevitable decline of the US Empire and its West European factotums, the delusional behaviour is alarming. Nowhere was this more evident than when Marco Rubio addressed the Munich Security Conference on February 14th. This son of Cuban immigrants, thus himself and family victims of the West’s colonial project, stood at the podium speaking as We and Us, as though he was himself of Western European heritage. As if this was not delusional enough, he went on to glorify Western colonialism, “its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers”. He told the audience that in 1945, “great European Empire’s had fallen into terminal decline” accelerated by what he called “Godless communist revolutions and anti-colonial uprisings”. He opined that “then as now, many came to believe that the West’s age of dominance had come to an end and that our future was destined to be a faint and feeble echo of our past”.

However, he exclaimed with passion, “together our predecessors recognized that decline was a choice and it was a choice they refused to make”. He declared, “this is what we did together once before, and this is what President Trump and the US want to do again now, together with you”. He told the audience that the US does not want allies who are “shackled by guilt and shame” but rather “allies who are proud of their culture and heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same noble civilization and who together with us are willing and able to defend it”. He declared “we in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline.”

Perhaps the only thing more delusional than Rubio’s speech was the fact that the audience, made up primarily of European dignitaries and NATO officials drank the Kool Aid, giving Rubio a standing ovation. Reality check: the Hegemon’s reign of tyranny is over, the US/UK/EU decline is in motion and their collapse is inevitable.

Doctors not Bombs

Fact check: Far from being a threat of any kind, Cuba is in fact responsible for saving millions of lives worldwide.

“Our country doesn’t drop bombs on other people. We don’t have biological or nuclear bombs. We train our doctors to help other nations.”

This quote is from Fidel Castro’s speech at the University of Buenos Aires in 2003, shortly after the first US so-called “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq in March of that year. Castro spoke of “doctors, not bombs”, stating that Cuba did not need to produce weapons of mass destruction or drop bombs on other nations, and that in contrast to the United States, Cuba would instead send “tens of thousands of scientists and doctors” to the “most lost corners of the world”. This positioned Cuba’s “revolutionary medicine” as a cornerstone of Cuban foreign policy. In 2005, Fidel Castro established the Henry Reeve Brigade. The Brigade, a highly specialized Cuban medical contingent provides rapid, voluntary humanitarian aid worldwide, specializing in natural disasters (floods, earthquakes) and severe epidemics such as Ebola and COVID-19. The Brigade was named after Henry Reeve, an American-born Brigadier in the Cuban Liberation Army who fought for Cuban independence in the 19th century. Since 2005, the brigade has deployed thousands of health professionals to over 45 countries, saving tens of thousands of lives. Most notable interventions include the 2014 Ebola response in West Africa, the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and global support during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cuba’s healthcare system has achieved health outcomes that have far surpassed so-called developed nation health outcomes in areas such as life expectancy and infant mortality, despite the pressure of constant economic sanctions. Healthcare in Cuba is free, available to all and premised on a community based, preventative medicine approach, a “family doctor” model, and the world’s highest doctor-to-patient ratios. Despite shortages of medicines and infrastructure due to economic conditions, the system prioritizes top-tier healthcare for all Cubans and never fails to deliver despite the challenges.

What makes the Cuban healthcare model and medical education so outstanding is that it is holistic, and therefore able to connect the dots between every aspect of a human being’s existence and that person’s state of health and well being. Should we no longer send our students to Cuba to avail themselves of this extraordinary training and healthcare model, we will not just be losing scholarship programmes but access to a transformative and progressive model that can assist Guyana to develop our own healthcare system in a direction that is clearly superior to our current curative/reactive model.

Cuba’s contributions to global public health and medical knowledge cannot be overstated and is acknowledged worldwide. Cuba is a health power. Its medical internationalism is one of the largest and most significant healthcare efforts in history. Since 1963, over 420,000 medical professionals have served abroad, delivering healthcare to 150 countries across the world. According to data from Cuba’s Ministry of Public Health shared in 2021, these healthcare professionals have performed more than 14,500,000 surgical operations, 4,470,000 deliveries and saved 8,700,000 lives. These figures are simply extraordinary for a small island nation that has been under crippling sanctions for decades.

Cuba sent an international mission to fill the public health gap in Algeria, after they had gained independence in 1963, kick starting their policy of medical internationalism. In 2005, they built field hospitals and provided healthcare after the disastrous Kashmir earthquake. After the earthquake in Haiti, which also led to a Cholera epidemic, Cuban teams provided ongoing healthcare, even when many foreign teams had left, performing hundreds of thousands of surgeries. When the Ebola Epidemic broke out in Africa in 2014, Cuban Healthcare workers, in coordination with the World Health Organization (WHO, were amongst the first to arrive in the affected nations, namely Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. During the COVID-19 pandemic that sent the world into lockdown and led to the near collapse of many healthcare systems including in some first world nations, Cuba deployed 58 medical brigades to 42 countries, including Qatar and Italy. When the devastating earthquakes hit Syria and Turkey in 2023, Cuba mobilized medical teams and deployed them in under 48 hours. In all these disasters and more, Cuba has responded not only with medical equipment but by placing their doctors and nurses in the field, often at great personal risk.

Cuba has more often than not been the first and only consistent medical presence in times of crises, when many countries, specifically Western nations, looked the other way. Recognizing their immense contribution, in 2017, The WHO bestowed the Dr. Lee Jong-Wook Memorial Prize for Public Health on Cuba in recognition of its emergency response work.

One of their most remarkable flagship programs has been operation Milagro (Operación Milagro), the aim of which was to restore vision on a global scale. Carried out in cooperation with Venezuela, Cuban medical brigades have provided over 3.3 million free eye surgeries to people from poor backgrounds, often in countries with little or no access to surgical options.

The Cuban Medical Brigades have achieved huge success because they are rooted in solidarity and the primacy of the well-being of the human person over financial gain, which stands in stark contrast to profit-driven and inequitable healthcare systems, especially evident in the US.

In the immortal words of Fidel Castro, “Why should some people walk barefoot, so that others can travel in luxurious cars? Why should some live for thirty-five years, so that others can live for seventy years? Why should some be miserably poor, so that others can be hugely rich? I speak on behalf of the children in the world who do not have a piece of bread. I speak on the behalf of the sick who have no medicine, of those whose rights to life and human dignity have been denied.”

Cuba did not just send its own doctors but ensured that they were educating future doctors globally. Training doctors on the ground where they were present and providing tens of thousands of foreign students with the opportunity to study to medicine in Cuba, mostly for free or very little, on the condition that when they graduate, they return to their countries and serve under-served communities.

In addition to all this, Cuba has achieved significant scientific advances, spearheading work in the area of HIV prevention, being the first in the world, noted by WHO in 2015, to eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis through integrated prenatal screening.

Making major advances in vaccine development and biotechnology, Cuba became one of the first countries in the Global South to develop its own Hepatitis B vaccine, achieving near-universal immunization and dramatically reducing related morbidity. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Cuba again successfully developed multiple vaccines using protein-subunit technology and they were shared with other countries in the Global South who were being excluded from access to vaccines, while Western pharmaceutical companies were raking in huge profits.

Another feat achieved by Cuba was the use of innovative technology and community-based health care models to significantly reduce diabetes-related amputations, one of the leading causes of disability and premature mortality in the Global South.

I have focused on Cuba’s extraordinary achievements in the area of healthcare because the Medical Brigades are under attack, however, their achievement in the area of education and other social indicators are equally outstanding

In a world full of sell-outs, cowards and traitors, clamouring to surrender to the US bully, Cuba stands as a beacon of light. An example to all that there are still those who refuse to surrender to the Hegemon’s tyranny. 67 years of resistance in the face of sanctions that have arrested Cuba’s development at every turn, has created a nation that has attained a mythical, legendary status – the ultimate David and Goliath story. There are few nations in this world that can actually claim to be sovereign and truly independent. This small, defiant island nation, 90 miles off the coast of Miami, is one of them. Trump, Rubio and Hegseth cannot and must not have their way. The fight for Cuba is literally a fight for all humanity.

Fidel Castro summed it up when he addressed the South Summit in Cuba in 2000:

“We are fighting for the most sacred rights of the poor countries; but we are also fighting for the salvation of a First World incapable of preserving the existence of the human species, of governing itself in the midst of contradictions and self-serving interests. And much less of governing the world whose leadership must be democratically shared. It could almost be mathematically demonstrated that we are fighting to preserve life on earth.”

Gerald A. Perreira is a liberation theologian, educator and political activist.

19 February 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Michael K Smith

Jesse Jackson’s (1941-2026) life work was mobilizing members of an underclass that was presumed not to exist where the “American Dream” reigned. In his second run at the presidency in 1988, he found them by the millions.

His Rainbow Coalition spanned the whole of society: farmers, white unionists, feminists, Hispanics, students, environmentalists, and a full 95% of black people. The only ones definitively outside the tent were the owners of massive concentrations of capital and their servant professionals.

Jackson’s ideology was a refreshing departure from Cold War orthodoxy. He flatly rejected the notion that Americans had any common cause with the likes of Batista, Diem, Pinochet, the Shah, Somoza, and Marcos. Eager to spend on citizens, not perpetual war, he called for a freeze on nuclear weapons, large cuts in Pentagon spending, withdrawal of U.S. troops from Europe, the elimination of first-strike MX, Cruise, and Trident D-5 missiles, along with the canceling of Reagan’s first-strike enabling Star Wars delusion. Alone among candidates, he held that Palestinians were a people deserving of national rights and a homeland.

Billed by the capitalist media as a non-viable regional candidate in the race merely to lend color to the campaign, he attracted huge crowds that cheered his denunciation of wage-slashing, pension-busting, job-exporting capital for its lack of conscience. They roared delighted approval when he waxed indignant at “American multinationals firing free labor at home to hire repressed labor abroad.”

Trumpeting a “Worker’s Bill of Rights,” he promised everyone the right to a job, membership in a democratic union, a living wage, a healthy life and safe workplace, pension security, fair play, education, respect, and freedom from discrimination.

Pundits yawned.

For catering to the needs of the majority, Jackson was dismissed as a captive of “special interests.” A series of primary elections on “Super Tuesday” was said to be his political Waterloo, the day his ephemeral popularity would reveal itself as confined to the Deep South.

The American people missed their cue. Laid off auto workers flocked to Jackson’s banner, awarding him 55% of the Michigan Democratic vote, including 20% of the white vote, four times his portion in the 1984 race. Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis trailed him by 27 points. After thirty-one primaries and caucuses, Jackson was ahead in the popular vote, was nearly even in delegates, and was indisputably the leading contender for the Democratic nomination.

Israel fanatics organized a counter-mobilization. Photos of Jackson with Yasir Arafat circulated widely in the press. Bankrupt charges of anti-Semitism were endlessly re-hashed. Panicked Democratic Party leaders launched an Anybody-But-Jackson campaign to bury the emergent threat of real democracy.

It worked.

With hunger, homelessness, AIDS, and tuberculosis thriving, Ronald Reagan’s vice-president (and former CIA director) George Herbert Walker Bush won the White House in the fall and continued the “Reagan Revolution,” otherwise known as vicious class war.

Expressing a fairly common business consensus, chief economist David Hale of Kemper Financial Services estimated that the Reagan years had bled the U.S. of one trillion dollars, an unprecedented financial haemorrhage (at the time) that had left the country “seemingly awash in a sea of red ink.”

Sources:

Frady, Marshall, “Jesse – The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson,” (Random House, 1996) pps. 380, 385, 387, 391-2

Colton, Elizabeth, “The Jackson Phenomenon – The Man, The Power, The Message,” (Doubleday, 1989) pps. 180-1

Chomsky, Noam, Deterring Democracy, (Hill and Wang, 1991), p. 82

________________

Michael K Smith blogs at www.legalienate.blogspot.com

19 February 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By A Correspondent

Choking a people to submit to the Empire’s economic and geopolitical interest, and to teach the peoples in countries about the payment to be made if they dare to defy the Empire, the imperialist power is spending a huge amount of money daily. If the amount is compared to the amount of money needed for alleviating suffering of the poor people’s lives in any country, the military expenditure being made by the Empire in its intensified war against Cuba will stand as astonishing, mind blowing. The amount is USD 20 million a day. But imperialism understands no other interest, but only self-interest. Now, anyone can calculate the amount of money already spent by the Empire, and no human-rationality will be found behind the expenditure already incurred.

Based on data from the Pentagon, the U.S. War Department, and other public sources, Bloomberg, one of the leading mainstream U.S. media, calculated: Millions of dollars have been allocated by the U.S. to wide-ranging military deployment in the southern Caribbean and eastern Pacific in recent months. Between mid-November to mid-January, the daily operating expenses of these forces reached over USD 20 million. This expenditure is on account of war ships, war planes, and other war assets. Additional costs for flight-hours, ammunition spent and extra personnel payments made are not included in this calculation. Operation Southern Spear, the tag that has been put by the Empire on the body of the military operation in the region, comprises Operation Absolute Resolve, the military aggression made against Venezuela, reached at its peak with 20 percent of the U.S. Navy’s surface fleet. The strike group is led by the USS Gerald Ford, the aircraft carrier and the largest warship of the U.S. The strike group comprises of dozens of destroyers, cruisers, submarines, logistic vessels, drones and fighter jets. The strike group’s daily operating cost that includes intelligence, logistics, cyber support and operational rehearsals is about USD11.4 million. This armada is joined by two amphibious response groups – the USS Iwo Jima and the USS San Antonio, and a Marine Expeditionary unit. The total operating cost of these units is about USD8.59 million daily. About USD1million daily operating cost on account of logistics and support ships are added to the costs mentioned above, reportedly pushing the total amount of expenditure to more than USD2.9 billion since the deployment was activated. Citing explanations by former Pentagon comptroller Elaine McCusker, the Bloomberg report added: The Operation Southern Spear would have cost “about USD2 billion as of August 2025,” the figure only covers the incremental costs of operating these war machines and replacing the weaponry used. The U.S. media outlet said: The Empire’s Caribbean military operation has cost the U.S. taxpayers about USD3 billion. Bloomberg said: The White House maintains that these operations do not incur extra funds for taxpayers, as the units are already deployed. However, specialists claim that there is no specific line item for contingencies in the budget of the War Department. The report said: The U.S. lawmakers have acknowledged that they do not yet have an official estimate from the Pentagon. To the lawmakers, the operation is “a very costly proposal”, because of the scale of the forces deployed in the Caribbean.

A comparison can be made after having a primary estimate of cost of the Empire’s military operation in the region. What are the sizes of economy of Cuba and the U.S.? Georank.org said: Cuba ranked about 69/197 with a GDP of USD107 billion, (https://georank.org/economy/cuba). According to the World Bank, in most recent year-data, 2020, the value of Cuban economy was (in million) USD107,352 (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=US) while in 2024 the value of U.S. economy was 28,750,956.13 in 2024 (ibid.). The U.S. economy is the world’s largest economy by nominal GDP and second largest by purchasing power parity (PPP) (“Report for Selected Country Groups and Subjects (PPP valuation of country GDP”, IMF, retrieved April 20, 2022). According to GlobalMilitary.net, Cuba’s “active-duty strength is approximately 50,000 (personnels)…. Its towed artillery includes Soviet-era D-30 and M-46 pieces, supplemented by BM-21 Grad multiple rocket launchers…. Its Air and Air Defense Force is primarily a ceremonial and ground-based defense force due to severe fuel and spare parts shortages. The fighter inventory consists of MiG-29, MiG-23, and MiG-21 aircraft…. Its navy is a littoral defense force focusing on coastal denial. It operates the Delfín-class midget submarine and a small number of Pauk II-class corvettes…. Notable assets include the BP-390 and BP-391, which are converted large fishing vessels modified to serve as helicopter-capable patrol ships. Coastal defense is supported by a missile system. Cuba’s state-owned Unión de Industrias Militares manages the domestic defense sector …. The UIM has achieved a degree of self-sufficiency in maintenance and small arms production. The UIM focuses on the life-extension of Soviet-era hardware…. Since 2025, the UIM has increasingly diverted resources toward the civilian economy, producing hygiene products and furniture to offset the military’s operational costs amidst national economic instability…. Its force structure remains static … The primary constraint facing the military is a lack of sustained fuel supplies, which has effectively grounded the air force and restricted army maneuvers to battalion-level exercises or smaller. (https://www.globalmilitary.net/countries/cub/) Cuba’s air force have 40 active aircrafts, and its reserve force strength is 39,000 personnels. (ibid.). The U.S. military budget or military strength is known to all. The military budget, with variance in calculations, ranges from at least USD1 trillion to more than that amount. The two countries’ military strength is actually incomparable, or it is insensible to compare. With this background, the Empire’s economic war against Cuba is going on for decades, and now it has been intensified. A few days ago, media reports said, the U.S. captured an oil tanker in international water. A few days ago, the U.S. President Donald Trump said: Kidnapping Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel would be an easy operation for the U.S. military. He was speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One. He asserted or boosted: Cuba has no food, no fuell, no money.

The figures above reflect a reality. However, this a part of the whole reality, as there are other aspects of the reality. Cuba, according to the mainstream media reports, is struggling with food shortages. The fuel embargo by the Empire hurts rights to food of the Cuban people. A people are being starved simply for their effort to have their own way of life that includes dignity, self-reliance, rights of the people on their country’s resources. One of the people’s struggles is to have food sovereignty, and food sovereignty, according to the Way, “consists of the right of peoples to produce their food in their territory, in a way that reinforces their cultural values ​​and the environment. It must guarantee that peasants, family farmers, and rural women have the necessary resources to produce food, and have greater access to and control over land, seeds, water, credit, and markets.” Cuba is in quest of dropping its dependence on food imports through encouraging science-driven local food production that sustains. For this purpose, the country has engaged significant work to solidify local food systems, so that access to nutritious food by its people is ensured. The island-country is encouraging agroecology. The Empire’s economic war is harshly impairing Cuba’s plans to strengthen its right to grow its own food. The progress Cuba has made over the last years to gain food sovereignty is now facing the threat of destabilization due to the Empire’s intensified economic war. Within this reality, the Cuban people are not surrendering their struggle to attain food sovereignty. They are carrying on their cultivation activities. This is the two opposite sides of the reality, a dialectics in motion in the areas of economy and war, which transpires in this Imperial World Order, and which is being witnessed by human history, and which will be recorded in the history of human’s journey towards progress, towards an equitable, dignified political-economic system for all, for the exploited. The Empire feels threatened with a political-economic system alternative to its system. The purpose of the Empire’s intensified economic war against Cuba is to create and foam up Cuban people’s anguish and dissatisfaction against the political-economic system the people are having currently. The Empire expects that the people will rise up and overthrow their government, the system. This is the political-economic system that assists countries in their health care system, with Cuban doctors, medicines, expertise, with literacy campaign to fight out ignorance – a humane approach to the suffering people while the system itself is now facing strangulation coming out as a result of scarcity of fuel, food, medical treatment, and daily running of life.

It should be stated that the Korean people had huge and wide support and assistance including volunteer-fighters from China and weapons from Russia while they were fighting imperialism, led by the U.S. General McArthur. Almost identical support from Russia and China, without volunteer-fighters, were received by the Vietnamese people. In the fight for freedom, and against apartheid and imperialist intervention by the peoples of Angola, Ethiopia and South Africa. At least 50,000 Cuban volunteer-fighters took part in Angola against the imperialists, and many of the Cuban fighters shed their lives there.

The Cuban people’s struggle for upholding their independence and freedom, for a dignified life, for a life free from all forms of servitude, struggle against exploitation, appropriation and inequality, against racist, segregationist and backward ideologies, ideas and practices resemble struggles the Soviet people and their Red Army waged to defeat the reactionary, imperialist, monarchist forces, the White Army, which these rotten forces of history were continuing to encircle and crush the newly-created Soviet state of the Russian proletariat. The Soviet Red Army’s and people’s unparallel fight in Stalingrad, against the Nazi army’s longest military blockade in human history in Leningrad, now, St. Petersburg, the Chinese people’s protracted war during the First (1924-1927) and Second (1927-1937), Revolutionary Civil War Periods, the Period of the War of Resistance against Japan (1937-1945), and the Third Revolutionary Civil War (1945-1949), the Vietnamese people’s struggles against the French, Japanese and U.S. imperialists for independence and reunification of Vietnam resemble the Cuban people’s today’s fight in the economic front. The way the Vietnamese fighters got mobilized with heavy armaments in a hostile and impossible-terrain under the leadership of General Giap around Dien Bien Phu to defeat the “valiant” French occupation force, the way the Vietnamese people kept on their struggle in the northern part of their country, then North Vietnam, in two fronts – military and economy, especially in agriculture production also bear a resemblance to the Cuban people’s struggle. While the U.S. B-52 bombers were dropping bombs on crop fields to ignite fire and turn ripe rice into ashes, to make large craters in crop fields in then, North Vietnam, so that the Vietnamese farmers fail to cultivate, to destroy dikes and other water management structures, so that the Vietnamese farmers crop fields were inundated, the people relentlessly carried on farming activities, and simultaneously manned anti-aircraft guns targeting the bombers. The Vietnamese people succeeded. The Cuban people’s struggle in the economic sector today semblance the Chinese people’s struggles in the economic sector in/around their base areas. Two examples are worth mentioning:

1. The more than two-years- or “900 days and nights”-long (Sept. 1941-Jan. 1944, actually 872 days) siege of Leningrad, ended with victory of the Soviet people and its Red Army, and the sieging Nazi German army, Italian navy and their collaborating Spanish and Fin armies were pushed back to about 100 kms. from the second largest Soviet city, which the Nazis planned to wipe out “from the face of the earth.” The Nazis led by a Field Marshal, and its Fin collaborators led by another Field Marshal, with at least 34 divisions, failed to capture the undaunted Soviet people’s city. In a single day, during the siege, 276 Nazi bombers hit the Soviet city. The siege, considered by military historians and experts, was the most destructive and most deadly military operation against a city that caused death ranging from 1.6 to 2 million citizens in the city with a population of 3.2 million – the death toll was six times more than the total U.S. death-number during the entire WWII. A number of military historians conclude: The Leningrad Siege was civilization’s most lethal siege, and had “a greater death toll than any siege in history,” the number of deaths the city experienced was the largest loss of life in any modern city. The Nazis systematically starved the Leningrad citizens. All roads leading to Leningrad from the Soviet land was cut off. The Nazi Germans bombed and bombarded the city almost ceaselessly, so that the Leningrad citizens starve to death. Hated Hitler’s target was to destroy the city with its citizens. The Nazis targeted Leningrad, as the Soviet city was symbolically the birthplace of the 1917-Proletarian Revolution in Russia under the leadership of the Bolsheviks. On the onset of the World War II, Leningrad produced 11% of all Soviet industrial products. The Nazis planned to use food – lack of food – as its main weapon, and the Nazi scientists’ calculation led the Nazis, to imagine that the Leningrad citizens would face starvation within weeks and surrender. With disruption of food, water and energy supplies, the city experienced near-famine. Hitler’s dictate was: “Leningrad must die of starvation.” Citizens including teens and older women joined the Red Army soldiers in defending the city.
2. The Japanese military campaigns against the Communist-led base areas were brutal with “emphasis on killing, burning and robbing” that put the Communists and the people of and around the base areas on the defensive. At that time, the Communists, as a fun, used to say: “Because God did not bless us, we had three successive years of famine.” “The draught and crop failures were the most serious in North China (then under the Communists’ control) in a hundred years. The lack of rain was a heavier blow than the Japanese mopping-up campaigns …. Famine, drought, a locust invasion, plague and a blockade by Chiang Kai-shek threatened to diminish the effectiveness of the Border Region (the area between the Communist-controlled and the Japanese controlled areas) to practically nothing.” The Taihang and Taiyueh mountain areas experienced crop failure, the southern Hopei was hit by a flood, and locusts in Honan began sweeping over “all four provinces.” In addition to these, “one million starving refugees from the Kuomintang-occupied areas of Honan, crossed the Yellow River” and entered the border region. “Among these refugees, out of ten family members, it was estimated that five had died in their native places. The other five were flocking into the Communist areas to … save their lives. The Border Region tried to lend food, money and land to the refugees, but with a crop failure in their own areas, there was a limit to this relief. In Honan, the roads to the Taihang Mountains were soon filled with corpses. In the spring of 1942, the buds of all trees were eaten. The bark was stripped from every tree so that the trunks presented a strange white appearance like people stripped of clothes. In some places, the people ate the feces of silkworms, in other places, they ate a queer white earth. But such food could only stave off starvation for a few days and the victims quickly died. Women exchanged their babies, saying: ‘You eat mine, I’ll eat yours.’ When a man was going to die, he dug a pit and sat inside and asked neighbors to fill in the earth when he was dead. Afterword, … no one could be found to fill in the pits for all were either dead or too weak to shovel earth. Men sold their children first, then their wives. … In the no man’s lands along the borders of the Japanese-occupied areas, one could not find a cat, dog, pig or chicken, so there was no breeding. Many times, whole families committed suicide.” …. In order to relieve pressure on the worst parched land, the (communist-led) government moved over one hundred-thousand people to new land. The Communists-led government set up stations every ten miles to receive the hundreds of farmers who were pouring from their homes, … seeing no other way to remain alive. … The people “lost a good part of their faith during the draught…. Some villagers reached the conclusion that it was better to depend on themselves and Mao Tse-tung than on a god…. An invasion of locusts magnified the famine almost beyond human endurance. … great clouds of these bugs swarmed over four provinces, blotting out the sun and consuming almost all plant life in their path. The Communist Party started a Locust Beating-Down Campaign. Even in small areas, one hundred-thousand people were mobilized in the fields to defend the crops against the locusts. As the insects swept toward them, the people with sticks and clubs would stand waiting, drawn up in battle array like an army facing the invader. Also like an army they would dig trenches to block the advance of the locusts. Since locusts can fly only short distances before resting, many of them would light in trenches, like planes landing on refueling bases. As soon as they came down, the people would be on them with sticks and clubs beating and killing. Others would hold woolen bags into which dozens of people would throw the insects, which were then thrown into roaring fires. Still others would excitedly grab up the bugs, take them home and boil them for dinner. In winter and spring, thousands of people were organized to dig up the ground and kill locust eggs. The eggs thus dumped were estimated to weigh nearly three million pounds. During the whole campaign against the locusts, several hundred-million labor days were used. In the end, the people won the Insect War, and the locusts were defeated.” (Jack Belden, China Shakes the World, Monthly Review Press, 1970)

These are only two examples of the way proletarian revolutions face hostilities or hostile environment and the way the revolutions survive and win. Thousands of such examples are found in people’s struggle for political power, democracy, and determining their way of life by themselves in countries. This is found in today’s Cuba, among the Cuban people’s struggles to secure their life and revolution in the face of imperialist encirclement. The mainstream media always, and only present the mainstream viewpoints, news, statements, threats, and the Cuban people’s sufferings. However, their voices and ideas should also be listened, so that the Empire’s brutality, and the Cuban people’s courage and tireless effort within a complete hostile environment – natural, political, geopolitical and military – is perceived. For this reason, ears and attention should also be lent to the Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermudez’s voice. In an early-February press conference attended by the Cuban and international media, according to media reports from Cuba, the Cuban president said:

“We have faced the greatest pressure from the world’s leading power.”

He assured that Cuba’s leadership is aware of the population’s concerns, and also of “the intense media campaigns of slander, hatred and psychological warfare that are being imposed.”

The First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and President of the Republic explained the government’s projections, and the ways in which the leadership was “working to get out of the situation in the shortest possible time and, above all, the disposition, will and commitment with which” the leadership was working.

Answering to a question by a journalist from among the foreign media, the Cuban President explained:

It is closely related to the theory of the ‘failed state’ and in this way, the U.S. government has tried to characterize the Cuban situation.

According to the Cuban President, the theory of collapse is precisely linked to the U.S. government’s efforts to overthrow the Cuban Revolution. “There are two fundamental approaches: economic strangulation, which dates back to the 1960s with the Lester Mallory Memorandum, and military aggression.”

He said:

The “initial approach is summarized in one of the statements made by the President of the United States when he said that they had applied all possible pressure against Cuba. “He acknowledged then that there is no failed state, but rather one that has had to face, with great resistance, the maximum pressure from the world’s leading power; a power that also has an imperial foundation and a hegemonic purpose of domination.”

“The second direction is military aggression, when Trump asserted in his speech that there was no other option but to ‘occupy the place and raze it.’

“We have kept in mind that theory of economic strangulation throughout the 67 years of the Revolution, with the emergence of the blockade. Every generation of Cubans, from the early years of the Revolution to the most recent, has lived under the blockade and was born under the signs of this economic hardship. We have always faced shortages and complex difficulties. We have had to operate amidst vicissitudes, impositions, and pressures that are not imposed on anyone else in the world, much less for such a prolonged period.”

“In this sense, the collapse lies in imperial philosophy, but not in the mentality of Cubans.

“The collapse cannot be attributed solely to the pressures and intentions of an imperial government. Our vision includes the concept of resistance, of creative resistance, which involves defending the ideas we believe in, our convictions, and our victory. I am not an idealist. I know we are going to live through difficult times; we have before. But we will overcome those together, with creative resistance, with the effort and talent of the majority of Cubans.”

The Cuban leader cited the relationship with Venezuela, which “cannot be categorized as one of dependency.” He said: “To see it that way is to restrict it, to reduce it to an exchange of goods and services, and that is not the reality of the relationship we have had with Venezuela. Since Chávez led the Bolivarian Revolution, a whole relationship of cooperation and collaboration was forged, based on the principle of solidarity and complementarity, like two brotherly, friendly countries that could take advantage of each other’s potential for the sake of that integration.”

Miguel Diaz-Canel recalled the “the Comprehensive Cooperation Agreement between Cuba and Venezuela concluded more than 25 years ago, which covers energy, food sovereignty, education and literacy, training of personnel and human resources, industry, mining, telecommunications, and cultural and political exchange.” “That agreement transcended the relations between Cuba and Venezuela,” he said.

He revealed that four years later, ALBA-TCP was created, extending the benefits of that relationship to a group of Latin American and the Caribbean countries. “Subsequently, ALBA-TCP also supported Petrocaribe, a group of projects with an energy focus, oriented towards social justice, equity, opportunities and mutual benefit, the development of the peoples, not only of Venezuela and Cuba, but of Latin America and the Caribbean,” he said, adding: “Therein lies the concept of integration.” He emphasized: The “integration that Martí and Bolívar dreamed of, that Fidel and Chávez defended, and to which we are all committed.” On the output of these initiatives the Cuban president said: “No other regional integration bloc has achieved the social successes of ALBA-TCP in such a short time, ‘which was born as part of that close relationship between Cuba and Venezuela.’” The Cuban leader explicitly emphasized the “Mission Miracle, which restored sight to more than 3.5 million Latin Americans, not with a commercial focus, but with one of social justice and equity.”

Can any imperialist economy or political or geopolitical initiative or the multilateral financial organizations under its control cite a single such example in any country in its long, long history? Do the mainstream, media and academia, ever mention this fact of success?

He also highlighted the Cuban literacy method, among the achievements of that agreement, “where four countries declared their territories free of illiteracy.”

Here also comes the same question made above: A comparison between the two, and the results gained. Comapre this, not to belittle, but simply to compare, with Indonesia, India, the Philippines, Thailand – all these countries have more natural and money resources, expertise, foreign direct investment and external help/aid, and no economic blockade, not for a single month or week. Among these countries, Thailand was once praised and marketed by the mainstream as one of the Emerging Tigers in Asia. Look at hunger, illiteracy, ignorance, poverty and inequality in these countries.

While recalling that “this concept of complementarity and integration in a system of relations (between Venezuela and Cuba) is not based on selfishness, but on the most humanist concepts, from an approach of leaving no one behind, the Cuban President asked: “Since Cuba declared itself the first territory free of illiteracy in Latin America and the Caribbean, how many decades passed before other nations could achieve it?”

He said: Economic and commercial relations were forged between Cuba and Venezuela, along with important collaborative projects in energy and medical services, which were partly offset by fuel. “At one time they did cover all of our country’s fuel needs, but in more recent times they do not, because we must remember that Venezuela has been subjected to sanctions, coercive measures, and pressures that have affected this exchange.” He added: The energy and naval blockade against Venezuela began, which has prevented ships from that country, and even from other nations carrying Venezuelan fuel, from reaching Cuba. He said: “The situation is further aggravated by the executive order recently signed by the United States government, which uses threats of tariffs to manipulate countries that supply oil to Cuba. Under this pretext, they have practically imposed an energy blockade on our country.” On the future of Cuba-Venezuela relations, the Cuban President said: “It depends on how we are able to build that future from the present situation, of a Venezuela that has been attacked, whose president was illegally kidnapped and is being held in a prison in the United States.” He categorically said: “We don’t impose collaboration. We offer collaboration, we share collaboration, we share in solidarity when a government or the people ask us to. And under that concept we have maintained this collaboration with Venezuela over these years. Guided by Martí’s principles, Cubans have very strong feelings for Venezuela. As long as the Venezuelan government fosters and defends collaboration, Cuba will be willing to collaborate,” he emphasized.”

Any reader can compare the two positions, two approaches, two principles, two strengths and two methods found above: One is imperialist while the other is humanist, pro-people; one is for occupation and control of another country, the other is for securing a humane society so far built up amidst ocean-wide odds; one is for appropriation and exploitation of natural and human resources from another country, the other is for cooperation for mutual benefit of peoples in countries based on equality and mutual respect without selling out of sovereign rights and sovereignty of the peoples involved. This is not only an economic question. These involve ideological and political questions.

24 February 2026

Source: countercurrents.org