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By Edward Curtin

We live in a 24/7 media society of the spectacle where brainwashing is cunning and relentless, and the consuming public is consumed with thoughts and perceptions filtered through electronic media according to the needs and lies of corporate state power.

This propaganda comes in two forms: covert and overt. The latter, and most effective form, comes with a large dose of truth offered rapid-fire by celebrated, authoritative voices via prominent media. The truth is sprinkled with subtle messages that render it sterile. This has long been the case, but it is even more so in the age of images on screens and digital media where words and images flow away like water in a rapidly moving stream. The late sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman, updating Marx’s famous quote “all that is solid melts into thin air,” called this “liquid modernity.”

Welcome to Operation Pandemonium

See, these experts purport to say: What we tell you is true, but it is impossible to draw definitive conclusions. You must drink the waters of uncertainty forever lest you become a conspiracy nut. But if you don’t want to be so labelled, accept the simplest explanation for matters that disturb you – Occam’s razor, that the truest answer is the simplest – which is always the official explanation.  If this sounds contradictory, that is because it is. It is meant to be. We induce schizophrenia.

And it is, these experts suggest, because we live in a world where all knowledge is relative, and you, the individual, like Kafka’s country bumpkin, who in his parable “Before the Law,” tries to get past the doorkeeper to enter the inner sanctum of the Law but is never allowed to pass; you, the individual, must accept the futility of your efforts and accede to this dictum that declares that all knowledge is relative, which is ironically an absolute dictum. It is the Law. The Law of contradictions declared from on high.

Many writers, journalists, and filmmakers, while allegedly revealing truths about the U.S. and its allies’ criminal operations at home and abroad, have for decades slyly conveyed the message that in the end “we will never know the truth,” the real facts – that convincing evidence is lacking.

This refusal to come to conclusions is a sly tactic that keeps many careers safe while besmirching, intentionally or not, the names of serious researchers who reach conclusions based on overwhelming circumstantial evidence (the basis for most murder convictions) and detailed, sourced facts, often using the words of the guilty parties themselves, but are dismissed with the CIA weaponized term “conspiracy theorists.”

This often escapes the average person who does not read footnotes and sources, if they even read books. They read screens and the mainstream media, which should now be understood to include much of the “alternative” media. And they watch all sorts of films.

But this “we will never know” meme, this false mystery, is shrewdly and often implicitly joined to another: That we do know because the official explanation of events is true and only nut cases would believe otherwise. Propaganda by paradox.  Operation chaos.

The JFK Assassination and the Release of Files

Image: Picture of President Kennedy in the limousine in Dallas, Texas, on Main Street, minutes before the assassination. Also in the presidential limousine are Jackie Kennedy, Texas Governor John Connally, and his wife, Nellie. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

There are so many examples of this, with that of President Kennedy’s assassination being a foundational one. In this case, as with the current phony Trump release of more JFK assassination files, the ongoing “mystery” is always reinforced with the implicit or explicit presupposition that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy, but yet implying that there are more mysteries to explore forever because “people” are paranoid. (Trump’s position, as he recently told interviewer Clay Travis, is that he has always believed Oswald assassinated Kennedy, but he wonders if he may have had help.) They are paranoid not because of government and media lies, but because “popular culture” (not highbrow) has created paranoia. To spice this up, there is often the suggestion that President Kennedy was assassinated on the orders of the Mob, LBJ, Cuba, or Israel, when the facts overwhelmingly confirm it was organized and carried out by the CIA. A. O. Scott’s recent front page article in The New York Times in response to the JFK files release – “J. F. K., Blown Away, What Else Do I Have to Say?” (the title appropriately taken from a very fast-paced Billy Joel song and video) – is a perfect example of such legerdemain.

Thus the ruse to keep debating the assassination, get the latest documents, etc. to satisfy “people’s” insatiable paranoia. To pull out CIA fallback stories 2, 3, or even 4 when all else fails. Dr. Martin Schotz, the JFK researcher, rightly compares this to George Orwell’s definition of Crimestop:

‘Crimestop’ means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, or misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to [the powers that be]… and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. ‘Crimestop’, in short, means protective stupidity.

It’s the crazy people’s fault, not Scott’s or those who back him up at The Times, a newspaper that has been lying about the JFK assassination from day one. The same goes for the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, et al., and so many key events in U.S. history. It is a game of creating mental chaos by claiming we do know because the official explanation is correct but we don’t know because people have been infected with paranoia. If only people were not so paranoid! Unlike us at The Times, goes the implicit message.

The Epistemological Games of Certain Filmmakers

It is well known that people today are watching far more streaming film series and movies than they are reading books. That someone would lucubrate with pen in hand over a footnoted book on an important issue is now as rare as someone without a cell phone. The optical-electronic eye-ear screen connection rules most lives, mental and sensory. Marshall McLuhan, if a bit premature while referring in 1962 to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – the French philosopher, paleontologist, and Jesuit priest – wrote sixty-three years ago in The Gutenberg Galaxy:

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. [my emphasis] So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.

Four years ago this month, I wrote an article – “You Know We’ll Never Know, Don’t You?” – about a new BBC documentary film series by the acclaimed British filmmaker, Adam Curtis, “Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World.”

The series is a pastiche film filled with seven plus hours of fleeting, fragmented, and fascinating archived video images from the BBC archives where Curtis has worked for decades, accompanied by Curtis’s skeptical commentary about “a world where anything could be anything because there was no meaning anywhere.” These historical images jump from one seemingly disconnected subject to another to reinforce his point. He says it is “pointless to try to understand the meaning of why things happen.” He claims that we are all living as if we are “on an acid trip.”

While not on an acid trip which I have never taken, I was reminded of this recently as I watched a new documentary – Chaos: The Manson Murders (2025) – by the equally famous U.S. documentary filmmaker, Erroll Morris, a film about the CIA’s mind control operation, MKULTRA, and its use of LSD. As everyone knows, the CIA is that way-out hippie organization from Virginia that is always intent on spreading peace, love, and good vibes.

While the content of their films differs, Curtis’s wide-ranging and Morris focused on Manson and the book by Tom O’Neil, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, I was struck by both filmmakers tendency to obfuscate while titillating their audience with footage and information that belies their conclusions about not knowing. In this regard, Curtis is the most overt and extreme.

Morris does not use Curtis’s language, but he makes it explicit at Chaos’s end that he doesn’t believe Tom O’Neil’s argument in his well-researched book that Charles Manson was part of a CIA mind-control experiment led by the psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Jolyon “Jolly” West. West worked in 1967 for the CIA on MKULTRA brainwashing projects in a Haight Ashbury clinic during the summer of love, using LSD and hypnosis, when Manson lived there and was often in the clinic with his followers.

On April 26, 1964, West also just “happened” to visit the imprisoned Jack Ruby, the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald in the Dallas Police Department, and when West emerged fro the meeting, he immediately declared that in the preceding 48 hours Ruby had become “positively insane” with no chance that this “unshakeable” and “fixed” lunacy could be reversed. What happened between the two men we do not know – for there were no witnesses – but one might assume West used his hypnotic skills and armamentarium of drugs that were integral to MKULTRA’s methods.

MKULTRA

MKULTRA was a sinister and secret CIA mind-control project, officially started in 1953 but preceded by Operation Bluebird, which was renamed Operation Artichoke. These operations started right after WW II when U.S. intelligence worked with Nazi doctors to torture Russians and others to reveal secrets. They were brutal. MKULTRA was run by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb and was even worse. He was known as the “Black Sorcerer.” With the formula for LSD, the CIA had an unlimited amount of the drug to use widely, which it did. It figured prominently in MKULTRA mind control experiments along with hypnosis. Tom O’Neil sums it up thus:

The agency hoped to produce couriers who could imbed hidden messages in their brains, to implant false memories and remove true ones in people without their awareness, to convert groups to opposing ideologies, and more. The loftiest objective was the creation of hypno-programmed assassins. . . . MKULTRA scientists flouted this code [the Nuremberg Code that emerged from the Nuremberg trials of Nazis] constantly, remorselessly – and in ways that stupefy the imagination. Their work encompassed everything from electronic brain stimulation to sensory deprivation to ‘induced pain’ and ‘psychosis.’ They sought ways to cause heart attacks, severe twitching, and intense cluster headaches. If drugs didn’t do the trick, they’d try master ESP, ultrasonic vibrations, and radiation poisoning. One project tried to harness the power of magnetic fields.

In 1973 during the Watergate scandal, CIA Director William Helms ordered all MKULTRA documents destroyed. Most were, but some were forgotten, and in the next few years, Seymour Hersh reported about it and the Senate Church Committee went further. They discovered records that implicated forty-four universities and colleges in the experiments, eighty institutions, and 185 researchers, Louis West among them. The evil cat and its large litter were out of the bag.

MKULTRA allegedly ended in 1973. But only the most naïve would think it did not continue under a different form. In 1964, McLuhan wrote that “the medium is the message.” The new medium that was developed in the decades since has been effectively pointed straight at the brain as you watch the screens. And the message?

Tom O’Neil’s Powerful Case

While admitting that he has not conclusively proven his thesis because he has never been able to confirm Manson and West being together, O’Neil amasses a tremendous amount of convincing circumstantial evidence in his book that makes his case very strong that they were, and that Manson’s ability to get his followers to kill for him was the result of MKULTRA mind control and the use of LSD, which he used extensively and which was introduced by the CIA and used by West. Both men had an inexhaustible amount of the mind-altering drug to use on their victims.

This is the subject of Morris’s film, wherein he interviews O’Neil on camera, who explains the extraordinary fact that Manson was able to mesmerize his followers to kill for him without remorse or shame. They “couldn’t get him out of their heads,” even many years later. This was, of course, the goal of MKULTRA – through the use of brainwashing and drugs – to create “Manchurian Candidates.” This case has much wider ramifications than the sensational 1969 Hollywood murders for which Manson and his followers were convicted; for clearly Mansion’s “family” that carried out the murders on his orders appeared in every way to be under hypnotic control. How did a two-bit, ex-con, pipsqueak, minor hanger-on musician learn to accomplish exactly what MKULTRA spent so many years working on?

Yet at the end of his film, Morris makes a concluding comment without even a nod to the possibility that O’Neil is correct. He says he doesn’t believe O’Neil. I found it very odd, jarring, as though O’Neil had been set up for this denouement, which I think he had. But at the same time I recognized it as Morris’s method of setting up and then undermining the narrative protagonists in his films that are ostensibly about getting to factual truths but never do; they are stories about how all we ever have are endless interpretations and the unknowable, confounded by human fallibility. Everything is lost in the fog of Morris’s method, which is no accident.

Frank Olson

I then found an interview that O’Neil did in 2021 in which he said he pulled out of Morris’s film proposal because Morris wanted to make a film that combined the Frank Olson story (a CIA biologist) with his about Manson. In the interview, O’Neil said he knew Eric Olson, Frank Olson’s son, who has spent a lifetime proving that the CIA murdered his father in 1953, but he didn’t explain why he pulled out of the project. However, he appears extensively throughout Chaos, being interviewed on camera by Morris, only to be undermined at the end. Why he eventually agreed to be part of the project I do not know.

I am certain he has seen Wormwood (2017), Morris’s acclaimed (they are all acclaimed) Netflix film series about the biologist/ CIA agent Frank Olson and his son, Eric Olson’s heroic lifelong quest to prove that the CIA murdered his father because he had a crisis of conscience about the agency’s use of torture, brainwashing, LSD, and U.S. biological weapons use in Korea, much of it in association with Nazis. The evidence is overwhelming that Frank Olson did not jump from a NYC hotel window in 1953 but was drugged with LSD to induce hallucinations and paranoia, smashed in the head, and thrown out by the CIA. [Read this and view this] Despite such powerful evidence available to him before making Wormwood, in another example of Morris’s method, he disagrees with Eric Olson’s decades of conclusive research that his father was murdered.

Conclusion

Filmmakers like Adam Curtis and Erroll Morris are examples of a much larger and dangerous phenomenon. Their emphases on the impossibility of knowing – this seeming void in the human mind, an endless acid trip down a road of kaleidoscopic interpretations – is much larger than them. It is deeply imbedded in today’s society. One of the few areas in which we are said to be able to know anything for certain is in the area of partisan politics. Here knowingness is the rule and the other side is always wrong. Fight, fight, fight for the home team! Here the nostalgia for “knowledge” is encouraged, as if we don’t live in a 24/7 media society of the spectacle where brainwashing is cunning and relentless, and the consuming public is consumed with thoughts and perceptions filtered through electronic media according to the needs and lies of corporate state power.

With the arrival of the electronic digital life, “knowledge” is now screening. If you don’t want to confirm McLuhan’s prediction – “as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside” – it behooves everyone to step back into the lamplight to read and study books. And take a walk in nature without your machine. You might hear a little bird call to you.

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Edward Curtin is a prominent author, researcher and sociologist based in Western Massachusetts.

25 March 2025

Source: globalresearch.ca

By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Despite the Greenlandic people voting in favor of independence and rejecting Trump’s agenda to control the island-nation, National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, US energy secretary, Chris Wright and J.D. Vance’s wife, Usha are set to visit Greenland and the locals are outraged. The Guardian ‘Anger in Greenland over Usha Vance and Mike Waltz’s planned visit this week’ reported that

“Greenland’s prime minister, Múte B Egede, has called for the international community to step in after it was announced that Donald Trump’s national security adviser and the US second lady will visit the Arctic Island, accusing Washington of “foreign interference”.

One media network that has not been honest in its reporting on how the Greenlandic people feel about Trump’s agenda to control their territory as a colony.  So, in this case, it is Fox News, a cheerleader for Trump, has published a report based on Greenland’s latest parliamentary election results, ‘Greenland’s center-right party pulls off upset victory as Trump seeks control’ said the following:

Greenland’s center-right Demokraatit party pulled off a surprise victory in the country’s parliamentary elections, taking Greenlandic Prime Minister Múte Egede’s party, Inuit Ataqatigiit, out of power. Independence from Denmark became a focal point of the election amid President Donald Trump’s repeated talk of the U.S. taking control.

“People want change… We want more business to finance our welfare,” said Jens-Frederik Nielsen, Demokraatit’s leader, according to Reuters. The outlet added that Nielsen said Greenland does not “want independence tomorrow” and would prefer separation from Denmark be based on a “good foundation”

Greenland did vote for a party who eventually wants Independence from Denmark, granted, that part of their article was correct, but Fox News failed to mention that the Demokraatit party is also strongly opposed to Trump’s agenda by turning it into a de facto colony.

The article that Fox News referenced from Reuters, ‘Greenland’s independence gradualists win election amid Trump control pledge’ said that:

Trump’s vocal interest has shaken up the status quo, and coupled with the growing pride of the Indigenous people in their Inuit culture, put independence front and centre in the election.

In the final debate on Greenland’s state broadcaster KNR late on Monday, leaders of the five parties currently in parliament unanimously said they did not trust Trump. “He is trying to influence us. I can understand if citizens feel insecure,” said Erik Jensen, leader of government coalition partner Siumut

Notice how Fox News failed to mention that one important part from the Reuters article where it clearly says that the “leaders of the five parties currently in parliament unanimously said they did not trust Trump.”

In the last joint session of congress, Trump said that he has “a message tonight for the incredible people of Greenland” he continued,

“We strongly support your right to determine your own future, and if you choose, we welcome you into the United States of America.”

But here is where it gets interesting, he said that the US would “keep you safe, we will make you rich, and together, we will take Greenland to heights like you have never thought possible before.” 

Let’s look at the status of Puerto Rico and Guam, both colonies of the US government. Puerto Rico has high rates of poverty and crime than the majority of US states including the poorest state of the union, Mississippi. Guam considered an “unincorporated territory” meaning another colony of the US, also has high rates of poverty and health issues like heart disease, cancer and diabetes compared to most US states, so how does being “part of the US” benefit any of these territories?

“We need Greenland for national security and even international security, and we’re working with everybody involved to try and get it” Trump said, “But we need it really for international, for world security, and I think we’re going to get it. One way or the other, we’re going to get it.”

Trump also said something that should ring alarm bells,

“It’s a very small population, but a very, very large piece of land. And very, very important for military security.”

Trump is not the first US president to make such statements concerning Greenland, US Presidents Andrew Johnson in 1867, William Taft in 1910 to Harry Truman in 1946 all wanted to purchase or annex Greenland during their time in office.

When Trump first announced his plans to take Greenland and make it a US territory, many thought that it had to be a joke, but obviously, it’s not. Reuters ‘Trump interest in buying Greenland ‘not a joke’, Rubio says’ which reported what Trump is willing to do to get Greenland,

“Trump has expressed interest in making Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, a part of the U.S. since his reelection in November. He hasn’t ruled out using military or economic power to persuade Denmark to hand it over.”

The Secretary of State spoke on behalf of what Trump really meant about acquiring Greenland,

“This is not a joke,” Rubio said, “This is not about acquiring land for the purpose of acquiring land. This is in our national interest, and it needs to be solved.”

The Local Denmark reported what Denmark’s foreign minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, had said about Trump’s plan to buy Greenland,

“Trump will not have Greenland. Greenland is Greenland. And the Greenlandic people are a people, also in the sense of international law,” Rasmussen told reporters, adding that “this is also why we have said time and again that it is ultimately Greenland that decides Greenland’s situation.”

Reuters ‘Greenlanders overwhelmingly oppose becoming part of the United States, poll shows’ said that

“The survey by pollster Verian, commissioned by the Danish newspaper Berlingske and Greenlandic daily Sermitsiaq, showed only 6% of Greenlanders are in favour of their island becoming part of the U.S., with 9% undecided.”

The report went on to say that

“The poll showed that 45% viewed Trump’s interest in Greenland as a threat, with 43% saying they see it as an opportunity, leaving 13% undecided.” In its conclusion, “Only 8% of those polled said they would be willing to change their Danish citizenship to American, 55% said they would prefer to be Danish citizens, and 37% were undecided.”

This shows that if Greenland held a vote today, they would flatly reject Trump’s offer whatever it may be. The question is what will Trump do to get Greenland? Would he try to forcibly annex Greenland through a military invasion?

As I mentioned earlier, in the last joint session of Congress, Trump spoke to Greenland and said that “We strongly support your right to determine your own future” but why is Mike Waltz, Chris Wright and Usha Vance set to visit Greenland? It looks like the Trump regime is trying to intimidate Greenland who the majority are called the Greenlandic people also known as the Inuit, an indigenous tribe who makes up close to 89 percent of the population followed by 7.5% of Danish origin and other ethnic groups make up the remaining 3 percent.

It is certain that the people of Greenland will have the full support of the international community to stop the US government from occupying their land.  There will be mass protests in Greenland for starters and that would lead to a global condemnation against US imperial policies.

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Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his own blog site, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published.

25 March 2025

Source: globalresearch.ca

By Uriel Araujo

Since President Donald Trump’s administration froze and subsequently slashed funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) this year, Moldova—a small, geopolitically vulnerable nation—has been reportedly thrust into a maelstrom of uncertainty. The Elon Musk-led decision, part of Trump’s “America First” agenda, gutted over 80% of USAID programs globally, including those in Moldova, where the agency had long championed itself as a linchpin for civil society and democratic development—supposedly.

For Moldovan NGOs, once buoyed by American dollars, the fallout has been immediate and quite severe. This disruption offers a chance to actually peel back the veneer of USAID’s benevolence and NATO’s looming influence, thereby revealing a more troubling reality—one of dependency, manipulation, and geopolitical overreach.

The American move is actually part of a larger development, which includes Washington partially withdrawing from Eastern Europe while pivoting to the Pacific, and shifting the burden (of Ukraine, for one thing) onto its European “partners”. To make sense of this logic and understand how the US benefits from it, one just needs to connect these two pieces of news together: a) “European military powers work on 5-10 year plan to replace US in Nato” (Financial Times); and b) the U.S. is responsible for 43% of global arms sales, according to Statista’s Anna Fleck.

Back to Moldova, its NGOs, particularly those focused on allegedly promoting democracy, fighting corruption, and aiding media, have historically relied heavily on USAID funding. In 2024 alone, USAID poured $310 million into Moldova—a staggering enough sum for a nation of 2.6 million people. Over the last three decades, the Romanian speaking country has received around 2.5 billion dollars. Such funds, ostensibly for infrastructure and economic growth, often get funneled into the hands of a select elite of pro-Western activists and journalists.

When Trump’s cuts came into being organizations like Promo-LEX, which depended on USAID for 75-80% of its budget, saw projects grind to a halt. Salaries were slashed, staff laid off, and programs monitoring elections and political financing stalled. The Moldovan government, alongside these NGOs, has scrambled to secure European Union funds, but it turns out the EU’s bureaucratic inertia has left a gaping void.

On the surface, this looks like a disaster, and this is how many see the whole affair—a crippling blow to civil society in a nation already grappling with corruption. Such is the Western narrative and this is how Western propaganda would have us believe. But one just needs to dig deeper, and then the picture changes. Setting aside such wishful descriptions, it turns out USAID’s largesse wasn’t necessarily the altruistic lifeline it claims to be.

Much of its funding in fact propped up a narrow cadre of Western loyalists (I call them “westernalists”) who served as mouthpieces for the agenda of Moldova’s pro-Western President Maia Sandu while sidelining dissenting voices. Reports suggest $110 million went to “court journalists” and investigators tasked with smearing Sandu’s political rivals—hardly a democratic ideal.

A Reuter’s news report (February, 2) highlights USAID’s role in funding so-called independent media across Eastern Europe, including countries like Moldova. It notes that the funding freeze under Trump has indeed caused “chaos in the media ecosystem” in over 30 countries, which illustrates USAID’s significant financial support for media outlets.

According to The Independent, a $135 million USAID pledge was made in 2024 for “energy security” and to counter “Russian disinformation.” The short story is that USAID has invested heavily in Moldova’s media and civil society—hundreds of millions since 2020—to promote “democracy”, counter “disinformation”, and support “Western integration”.

This is similar enough to the script seen in Ukraine. In his 2022 article, University of Chicago political science John Mearsheimer (an eminent member of the so-called “realist” school of foreign policy) recalled that “the EU’s expansion eastward and the West’s backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine—beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004” were critical elements in bringing upon the ongoing crisis in the region.

What Mearsheimer described as the “West’s triple package of policies—NATO enlargement, EU expansion, and democracy promotion” were key factors. In writing candidly that endeavors to disseminate Western values and to “promote democracy” often involve “funding pro-Western individuals and organizations,” the academic reminds us that there is nothing “neutral” about such idealist initiatives.

Moreover, the October 2024 referendum, when Moldovans narrowly voted to enshrine EU membership in their constitution (the country currently has candidate status) was largely hailed as a triumph of Western alignment—because this is largely what it was all about. USAID and NATO cheerleaders framed it as a bulwark against “Russian meddling”, especially amid the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

Trump’s funding cuts (and his policy foreign changes) however cast a troubling shadow over this narrative. USAID, as mentioned, had been a key player in shaping Moldova’s pro-EU trajectory, bankrolling civic education and media campaigns to sway public opinion. Without this machinery, the referendum’s momentum feels fragile—it seems less a grassroots victory than a somewhat manufactured outcome now teetering on shaky ground.

Critics of USAID have long argued its role was less about empowering Eastern Europeans and more about pulling them into NATO’s orbit—to counter Russia militarily and “encircle” it rather than a tool to foster genuine European integration. NATO’s fingerprints are subtle but unmistakable: energy security projects, cybersecurity training, and even the CyberCor Institute launched with U.S. backing smack of strategic positioning. Considering all that, the referendum, sold as a democratic choice, begins to increasingly look like a geopolitical chess move, with Moldova as a sort of pawn, from a US-led Western perspective.

While any prognosis of the overall situation screams chaos, there is also a window of opportunity, from a Moldovan point of view. Looking ahead, it is a mixed bag. In the near-term, NGOs face a brutal squeeze. Economically, Moldova’s reliance on foreign aid—exacerbated by USAID’s past privatization schemes like the 1998 Pămînt program—leaves it vulnerable to collapse, with abandoned fields and unemployed workers. Yet there’s a silver lining. The funding halt could break Moldova’s cycle of dependency, pushing NGOs and other actors to innovate and the government to prioritize domestic revenue over foreign largesse. The referendum’s pro-EU mandate might hold if Moldova pivots to authentic self-reliance rather than staying under NATO’s militarized shadow—otherwise Moldova’s political actors, now in a changed political landscape, might rethink the whole affair.

While so much is talked about an alleged “Russian threat”, NATO remains the elephant in the room. Of course any regional great power will attempt to exploit a vacuum, but the truth is that a more independent Moldova is better positioned than one tethered to USAID’s puppet strings.

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Uriel Araujo, PhD, is an anthropology researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

25 March 2025

Source: globalresearch.ca

By Barbara Nimri Aziz

It was costly for British actor Vanessa Redgrave beginning in the 1970s, pilloried for her crime of speaking out on an unspeakable subject. She refused to back down, calling her adversaries ‘Zionist hooligans’. Yes, really! Forty years later, resolute in the face of a tenacious enmity, she retorted “I had to do my bit”, at the age of 81, still blacklisted by the entertainment industry, still under attack. 

In 1978, at the height of a distinguished career, Redgrave – a microphone in one hand, her Oscar in the other (for her role as the anti-Nazi crusader in Julia) – dared affirm her political principles while addressing the doggedly ‘apolitical’ Academy Awards audience. 

And what had Redgrave dared to do? Advocate sovereignty and justice for Palestine. Standing alone before fellow film stars and international viewers 47 years ago was far more daring than it is today. Did she realize the high price she would pay? Banishment from the profession and decades of relentless scorn followed that moment of moral probity. The bilious attacks on her stemmed from Palestine a documentary she produced the year before, in 1977. (Even its showing in 2023 was met by violent threats.) It was about the PLO. Remember the PLO? 

Today the blasphemous, unutterable word is ‘hamas’. As I expected, the outlawed term never crossed the lips of No Other Land’s happy Oscar holders at this year’s award ceremony. The Israeli director’s statement seemed well measured, considering the pitiful, helpless images of Gaza burned into the minds of tens of millions worldwide during the past 17 months. He called for parity between his people and the Palestinians, unfailingly adding an appeal for the release of Israeli hostages. As I recall, the words ‘Gaza’ and ‘genocide’ were totally absent in his statement and in brief, shy remarks by his Palestinian partner. 

The cost of this 2025 Oscar was surely paid (and continues to be extracted) in the saddest, most horrifying and highest human price – the massive number of martyred Gazans and uncounted wounded among the hundreds of thousands made homeless and starving. To this day. 

Perhaps the award is a sorry acknowledgement of Gazans’ sufferings and losses. Perhaps a substitute for the utter helplessness of millions of caring people worldwide marching in city-after-city in support of Palestinian rights and ending the genocide. Perhaps an alternate for failed legal actions to hold Israel accountable. Perhaps for the countless moral appeals that dissipated into a vacuum. Perhaps it is to compensate for earlier Palestine film nominees who never made the cut. (Like a life-achievement award to a veteran actor repeatedly passed over.) 

No Other Land is not the first film to gain Oscar attention. In 2013 Five Broken Cameras was nominated in the same category. An Israeli production, it chronicled a Palestinian family’s thwarted attempts to film the willful destruction of their home. In 2001, yet another Israeli production, Promises, reached the Academy’s list of nominees. It featured 7 boys– 4 Jews, and 3 Palestinians – residing in Jerusalem and The West Bank. At that time, it may have seemed prescient, a ‘promise’ of peaceful co-existence. Long forgotten. 

Significantly, like No Other Land, Promises and Five Broken Cameras, all depict Palestinian life – strained, tormented, or reflective; always fraught, forever uncertain – in the Occupied West Bank. Not Gaza. Not where hardships have always been so much more severe. (The Occupied West Bank had been conveniently accessible to outsiders, especially for an Israeli participant.)

Filmmaker Cherien Dabis, a rising figure in the industry, had hoped to break that pattern when she undertook production of All That’s Left of You inside Gaza. Dabis, the film’s Palestinian writer and director, began filming in Gaza in 2022. After the war erupted in October 2023, she was forced to shift production to Jordan and elsewhere, becoming a multi-national production. Premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, it stands above the others as an exclusive all-Palestinian work and features the well-known actors Maria Zreik, Mohammed Bakri and Ramzi Maqdisi. All That’s Left of You is an epic drama that traces the fortune of three generations of Palestinians beginning with the Nakba, the 1948 expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland. 

That momentous calamity is the focus of Farha, another new and powerful production. Told through the eyes of a teenage girl, Farha is by Jordanian-based director Darin Salaam in collaboration with Watermelon Films. Watermelon Films also produced From Ground Zero, a collection of 22 short films assembled from war footage sent from inside Gaza. (If our 17 months of live feeds via TikTok and on television have not shown us the story.)

Up to 30 years ago, most commentaries about Israel’s brutal occupation in Palestine were one-dimensional expositions from political scientists and an occasional journalist. (Among them Robert Fisk was an exception). They have now been eclipsed, perhaps unsurprisingly, by a generation of artists. Palestinian creative writers are in the forefront of interpreting for our distracted, distant world, the trauma and determination of compatriots in Occupied Gaza and the West Bank. Paralleling them are Palestinian-made films documenting their pasts and present. Currently showing in film festivals is A State of Passion and Where Olive Trees Weep. 

A State of Passion, by director Carol Mansour and producer Muna Khalidi, follows a British Palestinian surgeon’s valiant efforts during ongoing Israeli bombardment. It stands alone as the only Gaza-based production. Where Olive Trees Weep records Palestinian journalist and therapist Ashira Darwish’s 2022 journey in the West Bank. Salt of This Sea by Annemarie Jacir and Bye Bye Tiberias 2023 by Lina Soualem are also directed by Palestinian women.

Film festivals in Toronto and Chicago are exclusively devoted to the Palestinian experience. Showcases like these serve to draw attention to the sometimes-overlooked contributions of Arab filmmakers – many Palestinian. 2025 marks the 29^th year of AFMI, Arab Film and Media Institute in San Francisco, paralleling 25 years of Aflamuna in Beirut. A major US venue for Arab cinema talent, AFMI screens Arab films from across the globe. An established tradition in the Arab homelands, filmmaking in the diaspora is now flourishing. Early productions are less easy to find. But anyone who cares about Palestinian history can find work by veteran filmmakers Nazareth-born Elia Suleiman and the Lebanon-based team Mai Masri and Jean Chamoun whose first production was Under the Rubble (1983). The director of Omar and Rana’s Wedding is Palestinian-Dutch filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad . His Paradise Now was a 2006 Oscar nominee.

Repeated wars and upsets, inexorable hope, the arrival of new talent and the compulsion to not allow their rights and their struggle to die is affirmed in every one of these productions. Every personal story and recalled historical moment underlie the awful images of Gaza relentlessly piercing our consciousness. 

*

Barbara Nimri Aziz whose anthropological research has focused on the peoples of the Himalayas is the author of the newly published “Yogmaya and Durga Devi: Rebel Women of Nepal”, available on Amazon.

24 March 2025

Source: globalresearch.ca

The Masar Badil, the Palestinian Revolutionary Alternative Path Movement renews its call to the soldiers and officers of the Arab Army of Egypt, and to the masses of the Egyptian people, to assume their national, moral, Arab and human responsibility to defend Egypt’s sovereignty and dignity and support the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.

The current situation is extreme: The Camp David regime is fully involved in the genocidal siege and blockade of Gaza, illustrating its transition from a state of surrender to Zionist and US conditions into an actual participant in the US-“Israeli” crimes, preventing humanitarian aid from reaching the besieged Gaza Strip for 19 years, amid the ongoing Zionist aggression, the genocidal war, and the policy of starvation and imposed famine that has been ongoing since 7 October 2023.

The official position of the Egyptian regime does not respect the sentiments and wishes of our people in Egypt, Palestine and throughout the entire Arab world. It has become a sword and a whip in the hands of the Zionist entity, slaughtering and beating the Palestinian people on a daily basis. The Sisi regime in Cairo violates the principles of international humanitarian law, human rights law, and UN resolutions through its actions, which do not express the conscience of the great Egyptian people, nor does it represent Egypt’s brave soldiers and officers.

We urge the Egyptian masses and their national forces, the workers, students, men, women and free intellectuals, to take urgent action in the squares, streets, universities and unions to express their support for the resistance in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen. The ongoing repression and silencing of voices in Egypt aims to forestall change, protect US-Zionist interests, and prevent Egypt’s liberation from the “agreements” of humiliation and surrender to the enemy. It is urgent to pressure the Cairo regime to free all political prisoners and jailed activists from Egyptian prisons.

The Zionist enemy, and behind it, the United States and Western imperialist powers, seek to undermine and marginalize Egypt’s prestige and historical position through daily public expressions of their contempt for the regime in Cairo, an “ally” — in reality, a tool — of the United States, completely dependent upon the decisions of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, their interests and class and political privileges, at the expense of the Egyptian people, their self-determination and their future. This reality makes Egypt dependent and confined, with no ownership over its decisions and no meaningful sovereignty.

We renew our salute to the brave Yemeni people, their heroic armed forces and their steadfast revolutionary leadership, which supports our people’s struggle in Palestine. Their action has moved Yemen from a peripheral, marginalized position under previous governments to a central leading position at the heart of the struggle, a truly influential and effective Arab party in all regional and international calculations.

26 March 2025

Source: masarbadil.org

By Michel Chossudovsky

[This article titled Twenty-six Years Ago: NATO’s War of Aggression Against Yugoslavia. Who Are the War Criminals? by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky was first published by Global Research. You may read it here.]

Twenty-six years ago in the early hours of March 24, 1999, NATO began the bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. “The operation was code-named “Allied Force ” – a cold, uninspired and perfectly descriptive moniker” according to Nebosja Malic.

March 15, 2025. I am currently in Belgrade: This was NATO’s first war against a sovereign nation-state. It was a criminal undertaking. It was also a dress rehearsal for all subsequent US-NATO-led wars.

This article was first written in early May 1999 at the height of the bombing of Yugoslavia.

The causes and consequences of this war have over the years been the object of a vast media disinformation campaign, which has sought to conceal and dismiss NATO and US war crimes against the people of the former Republic of Yugoslavia.

It is important to note that in the late 1990s, a large segment of the “Progressive Left” in Western Europe and North America were part of this disinformation campaign, presenting NATO military intervention as a necessary humanitarian operation geared towards protecting the rights of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

The intervention was in violation of international law. President Milosevic at the 1998 Rambouillet talks had refused the stationing of NATO troops inside Yugoslavia.

The demonization of Slobodan Milošević has served over the years to uphold the legitimacy of the NATO bombings as well as conceal the crimes committed by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).

It also provided credibility to “a war crimes tribunal” under the jurisdiction of those who committed extensive war crimes in the name of social justice.

Slobodan Milosevic was arrested and deported to The Hague Tribunal ICTY detention Centre. The Just War thesis was also upheld by several prominent intellectuals who viewed the Kosovo war as: “a Just War”.

In turn the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was upheld by several “leftists” as a bona fide liberation movement rooted in Marxism.

The KLA –whose leader Hachim Thaci until recently was president of Kosovo– was a paramilitary army supported by Western intelligence, financed and trained by the US and NATO. It had ties to organised crime. It also had links to Al Qaeda, which is supported by US intelligence. Hashim Thaci has been on the Interpol list in the 1990s.

In April-May 1999, there was ample evidence that the KLA leader supported by NATO was responsible for war crimes and that he was the Interpol list. On a personal note: I was blacklisted by so-called progressives as well as by the mainstream media for revealing this evidence as well confirming that Hashim Thaci was on the Interpol list.

On March 11, 2006, Milošević was found dead in his prison cell. According to his lawyer who had been in contact with him, Milosevic had been poisoned.

Exactly ten years later on March 24, 2016, the Hague ICTY Tribunal exonerated Milosevic stating he was innocent of the crimes he was accused of.

In a bitter irony, Thaci was rewarded for his crimes, appointed prime minster of Kosovo in 2008, and then president in early April 2016.

Meanwhile, the United States established Camp Bondsteel in 1999, “the largest and the most expensive foreign military base built in Europe since the Vietnam War.”

It took the “international community” to acknowledge that Hashim Thaci had committed extensive crimes against humanity.

In June 2020, Kosovo President Hashim Thaci was charged with ten counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the country’s conflict in the 1990s by the Kosovo Tribunal in The Hague.

Thaci and three other former leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) are accused of overseeing illegal detention facilities where the movement’s opponents were kept in inhumane conditions, tortured and sometimes killed. He continues to be described as a wartime hero.

It is worth noting that the same “leftists” who supported the KLA in 1999 are now supporting the Syrian “revolutionaries” (affiliated to Al Qaeda and supported by US-NATO).

Today our thoughts are with the people of Yugoslavia whose country was fragmented and destroyed by US-NATO.

Our thoughts are also with the people of Kosovo who were victims of extensive NATO bombings as documented in this article written 21 years ago at the height of NATO’s war of aggression against Yugoslavia.

—Michel Chossudovsky, March 15, 2025

______________________________________________________

NATO’s War of Aggression Against Yugoslavia: Who Are the War Criminals?

By Michel Chossudovsky, 15 May 1999

Low Intensity Nuclear War

With NATO air-strikes entering their third month, a new stage of the War has unfolded. NATO’s “humanitarian bombings” have been stepped up leading to mounting civilian casualties and human suffering. Thirty percent of those killed in the bombings are children.[1] In addition to the use of cluster bombs, the Alliance is waging a “low intensity nuclear war” using toxic radioactive shells and missiles containing depleted uranium. Amply documented, the radioactive fall-out causes cancer potentially affecting millions of people for generations to come. According to a recent scientific report, “the first signs of radiation on children including herpes on the mouth and skin rashes on the back and ankles” have been observed in Yugoslavia since the beginning of the bombings.[2]

In addition to the radioactive fall-out which has contaminated the environment and the food chain, the Alliance has also bombed Yugoslavia’s major chemical and pharmaceutical plants. The bombing of Galenika, the largest medicine factory in Yugoslavia has contributed to releasing dangerous, highly toxic fumes. When NATO forces bombed plants of the Pancevo petrochemical complex in mid-April “fire broke out and huge quantities of chlorine, ethylene dichloride and vinyl chloride monomer flowed out. Workers at Pancevo, fearing further bombing attacks that would blow up dangerous materials, released tons of ethylene dichloride, a carcinogen, into the Danube.”[3]

NATO to the “Rescue of Ethnic Albanians”

Ethnic Albanians have not been spared by NATO air raids. Killing ethnic Albanians in Kosovo is said to be “inevitable” in carrying out a “humanitarian operation on behalf of ethnic Albanians”. In addition to the impacts of the ground war between the KLA and the Yugoslav Armed Forces, the bombings and the resulting radioactive fall-out in Kosovo have been more devastating than in the rest of Yugoslavia.

Presented as a humanitarian mission, the evidence amply confirms that NATO’s brutal air raids of towns and villages in Kosovo have triggered the exodus of refugees. Those who have fled their homes to refugee camps in Macedonia and Albania have nothing to return to, nothing to look forward to… An entire country has been destroyed, its civilian industry and public infrastructure transformed into rubble. Bridges, power plants, schools and hospitals are displayed as “legitimate military targets” selected by NATO’s Combined Air Operations Centre (CAOC) in Vicenza, Italy and carefully “validated prior to the pilot launching his strike.”

With the “diplomatic shuttle” still ongoing, the Alliance is intent on inflicting as much damage on the Yugoslav economy (including Kosovo) as possible prior to reaching a G8 brokered “peace initiative” which will empower them to send in ground troops. “Allied commanders have steadily widened their list of economic targets… Increasingly, the impact of NATO air strikes has put people out of work… causing water shortages in Belgrade, Novi Sad and other Serbian cities. … [T]he effect was to shut down businesses, strain hospitals’ ability to function and cut off water…”[4]. Some 115 medical institutions have been damaged of which several have been totally demolished. And hospital patients –including children and the elderly– are dying due to the lack of water and electricity…[5]

General Wesley Clark, NATO’s Supreme commander in Europe, confirmed in late May that “NATO’S air campaign has not reached its peak yet and the alliance should be prepared for more civilian casualties.”[6] General Clark also confirmed that “he would be seeking to increase the number of air strikes in Kosovo and expand the range of targets.[7] As the bombings entered their third month, there was also a noticeable change in “NATO rhetoric”. The Alliance had become increasingly unrepentant, NATO officials were no longer apologising for civilian casualties, claiming that the latter were contributing to “helping Milosevic’s propaganda machine.”

Extending the Conflict Beyond the Balkans

Drowned in the barrage of media images and self-serving analyses, the broader strategic interests and economic causes of the War go unmentioned. The late Sean Gervasi writing in 1995 had anticipated an impending War. According to Gervasi, Washington’s strategic goals stretched well beyond the Balkans. They largely consisted in “installing a Western-style regime in Yugoslavia and reducing the geographic area, power and influence of Serbia to a minimum….”[8]

In this context, the installation of American power in Southern Europe and the Mediterranean also constitutes a step towards the extension of Washington’s geopolitical sphere of influence beyond the Balkans into the area of the Caspian Sea, Central Asia and West Asia.

In this regard, NATO’s military intervention in Yugoslavia (in violation of international law) also sets a dangerous precedent. It provides “legitimacy” to future military interventions. To achieve its strategic objectives, national economies are destabilised, regional conflicts are financed through the provision of covert support to armed insurgencies… In other words, the conflict in Yugoslavia creates conditions which provide legitimacy to future interventions of the Alliance into the “internal affairs of sovereign nations.”

The consolidation of American strategic interests in Eastern Europe, the Balkans (and beyond) was not only marked by the enlargement of NATO (with the accession of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic as NATO members) barely two weeks before the beginning of the bombings, the War in Yugoslavia also coincided with a critical split in geopolitical alignments within the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

In late April, Georgia, the Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Moldava signed a pact in Washington, creating GUUAM, a regional alliance which lies strategically at the hub of the Caspian oil and gas wealth, “with Moldava and the Ukraine offering [pipeline] export routes to the West.”[9] This geopolitical split bears a direct relationship to the crisis in Yugoslavia. The region is already unstable marked by nationalist conflicts and separatist movements.

The members of this new pro-NATO political grouping not only tacitly support the bombings in Yugoslavia, they have also agreed to “low level military cooperation” with NATO while insisting that “the group is not a military alliance directed against any third party, namely Moscow.”[10]

Dominated by Western oil interests, the formation of GUUAM is not only intent on excluding Russia from the oil and gas deposits in the Caspian area but also in isolating Moscow politically thereby potentially re-igniting Cold War divisions…

The War Has Stalled Nuclear Arms Controls

In turn, the War in Yugoslavia has significantly stalled nuclear arms-control initiatives leading to the cancellation of an exchange program “that would have had US and Russian nuclear weapons officers in constant contact at year’s end to prevent any launches as a result of Year 2000 computer troubles.”[11]

Moreover, Russia’s military has also voiced its concern “that the bombing of Yugoslavia could turn out in the very near future to be just a rehearsal for similar strikes on Russia.”[12]

According to Dr. Mary-Wynne Ashford, co-president of the Nobel Peace Prize winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), the impact of NATO bombings of Yugoslavia “on nuclear weapons policy is an extremely serious development… Russians feel a sense of betrayal by the West… because NATO took this action outside the UN.”[13]

Aleksander Arbatov, deputy chairman of the Defence Committee of the Russian State Duma U.S.-Russian relations describes the War in Yugoslavia as the “worst most acute, most dangerous juncture since the U.S.-Soviet Berlin and Cuban missile crises.”[14] According to Arbatov:

“START II is dead, co-operation with NATO is frozen, co-operation on missile defence is out of the question, and Moscow’s willingness to co-operate on non-proliferation issues is at an all-time low. Moreover, anti-U.S. sentiment in Russia is real, deep and more wide-spread than ever, and the slogan describing NATO action – “today Serbia, tomorrow Russia,” is “deeply planted in Russian’s minds.”…[15] Mary-Wynne Ashford also warns that whereas Russia was moving towards integration with Europe, they [the Russians] now:

“…. perceive their primary threat from the West. Officials in [Russia’s] Foreign Affairs (Arms Control and Disarmament) told us that Russia has no option but to rely on nuclear weapons for its defence because its conventional forces are inadequate…. Even if the bombings stop now, the changes in Russia’s attitude toward the West, its renewed reliance on nuclear weapons with thousands on high alert, and its loss of confidence in international law leave us vulnerable to catastrophe…. This crisis makes de-alerting nuclear weapons more urgent than ever. To those who say the Russian threat is all rhetoric, I reply that rhetoric is what starts wars”.[16]

The Media War: “Silencing the Silent Majority”

This war is also “a War against the Truth”. With protest movements developing around the World, NATO has reinforced its clutch over the mass media. In a stylised (“wag the dog”) media masquerade, the Alliance is relentlessly portrayed as “the saviour of ethnic Albanian Kosovars.” A full-fledged “cover-up operation” has been set in motion with a view to thwarting public debate on the War. The hidden agenda is to “silence the silent majority.” The Western media heeding to the Alliance’s demands has blatantly misled public opinion. Casually portrayed on TV screens, civilian deaths are justified as inevitable “collateral damage”. According to the Pentagon, “there is no such thing as clean combat.”[17]

Meanwhile, anti-war commentators (including former ambassadors and OSCE officials) have been carefully removed from mainstream public affairs programmes, TV content is closely scrutinised, the images of civilian deaths and destruction relayed from Belgrade are seldomly and selectively displayed, journalists are under tight supervision. While the media does not hesitate to criticize NATO for having committed “errors” and “tragic mistakes”, the legitimacy of the military operation and its “humanitarian mandate” are not questioned:

“Public opinion is confronted with a loaded question which allows only one answer. In the present war, that question is, “Doesn’t ethnic cleansing have to be stopped?” This simplification allows the media to portray Yugoslavia rather than NATO as the aggressor. The alliance, in a complete inversion of reality, is presented as conducting an essentially defensive war on behalf of the Kosovar Albanians…” when in fact ethnic Albanians are the principle victims of NATO’s “humanitarian bombings.”[18]

According to NATO’s propaganda machine, “ethnic Albanians do not flee the bombings” and the ground war between the KLA and the Yugoslav Army. According to Diana Johnstone this makes them “nearly unique [because] throughout history, civilians have fled from war zones…. No, as we have heard repeatedly from NATO spokesmen and apologists, Kosovo Albanians run away from only one thing: brutal ethnic cleansing carried out by Serbs.”[19]

The refugee crisis we are told by NATO is limited to Kosovo. Yet the evidence (withheld by the Western media) confirms that people throughout Serbia are fleeing major cities:

Reliable estimates put the number of refugees who have left Belgrade to escape the bombing at 400,000. Most are women and children, as with the Kosovo Albanians. At least another 500,000 have left Serbia’s other cities, notably Novi Sad and Nish, where NATO bombing has caused air pollution, cut the water supply, and struck purely civilian targets such as market squares. Altogether, according to the Italian daily “Il Manifesto”, the NATO bombing has produced at least a million refugees in Serbia. Predrag Simic, foreign policy adviser to Serbian opposition leader Vuk Draskovic, told a Paris conference [in late May] that Kosovo was being so thoroughly devastated by NATO bombing that nobody, neither Albanians nor Serbs, would be able to go back and live there”.[20]

Who Is Responsible for War Crimes?

Public “disapproval” of NATO bombings is immediately dismissed as “Serbian propaganda”. Those who speak out against NATO are branded as “apologists of Milosevic”. While most anti-War critics in NATO countries are not defenders of the Milosevic regime, they are nonetheless expected to be “balanced” in their arguments. “Looking at both sides of the picture is the rule”: anti-war commentators are invited to echo NATO’s fabricated media consensus, to unequivocally “join the bandwagon” against Milosevic. Under these circumstances, an objective understanding and analysis of the role of the Milosovic government since the civil War in Bosnia and in the context of the present crisis in Kosovo has been rendered virtually impossible.

Media double standards? Whereas President Milosevic and four members of his government were indicted by the Hague International Criminal Tribunal (ICTY) (late May) for organising a policy of “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo, the news media failed to mention that several parallel law suits were launched at The Hague Tribunal (ICTY), accusing NATO leaders of “crimes against humanity.”[21]

It is also worth mentioning that the UK government (whose Prime Minister Tony Blair is among the list of accused in one of the parallel law suits) has provided The Hague Tribunal with “intelligence on the situation within Kosovo” since the beginning of the bombings.[22] Part of this intelligence material was relayed by the KLA with which British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook has been in frequent contact as well as through British Special Forces (SAS) directly collaborating with the KLA.

Lawsuit Directed Against NATO Leaders

In May, a group of 15 Canadian lawyers and law professors together with the American Association of Jurists (with members in more than 20 countries) launched a suit against NATO leaders at the ICTY in the Hague.[23] The suit points to “open violation” of the United Nations Charter, the NATO treaty, the Geneva Conventions and the “Principles of International Law Recognized by the Nuremberg Tribunal”. The latter makes: “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances” a crime.[24]

The list of crimes allegedly committed by NATO leaders includes:

“wilful killing, wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, extensive destruction of property,… employment of poisonous weapons [implying radioactive fall-out] or other weapons to cause unnecessary suffering, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity,… “[25]

Under the terms of reference of the ICTY “a person who planned, instigated, ordered, committed or otherwise aided and abetted in the planning, preparation or execution of a crime shall be individually responsible for the crime” and “the official position of any accused person, whether as Head of State or Government or as a responsible Government official, shall not relieve such person of criminal responsibility or mitigate punishment.”[26]

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson (and former President of Ireland) confirmed in Geneva on 30 April that the Prosecutor of the War Crimes Tribunal (ICTY) has the mandate not only to prosecute Serb forces but that the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and NATO may also come under scrutiny, “if it appears that serious violations of international humanitarian law have occurred.”

According to Walter J. Rockler, former prosecutor of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials:

“The bombing war also violates and shreds the basic provisions of the United Nations Charter and other conventions and treaties; the attack on Yugoslavia constitutes the most brazen international aggression since the Nazis attacked Poland to prevent “Polish atrocities” against Germans. The United States has discarded pretensions to international legality and decency, and embarked on a course of raw imperialism run amok.”[27]

Read the full article on Global Research.

25 March 2025

Source: michelchossudovsky.substack.com

Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian born Palestinian and former graduate student at Columbia University, has been detained in a prison in Louisiana and threatened with deportation for his association with pro-Palestine protests at Columbia, where he was a negotiator between the University and the student activists.   He is not the only foreign student to be threatened with deportation over his participation in these actions. At Cornell University, Momodou Taal, a Gambian-born UK citizen has been fighting expulsion and deportation for his participation in pro-Palestine protests, and at Yale, Dr. Helyeh Doutaghi, an Associate Research Scholar from Iran has been suspended for an alleged connection with Samidoun, an organization that supports Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons. There are tens of thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, many of them incarcerated without charge.

The detention and threat of deportation against Mahmoud Khalil and the punitive actions against other foreign students is a continuation of state repression practiced by Donald Trump and by his predecessors. The accusations against Khalil and the others are inventions meant to make examples of them and crush opposition to United States complicity in Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.

Zionist groups openly boast of giving the Trump administration names of non-citizens who they want to see deported. Yet Trump’s actions are an extension of the Patriot Act, the illegal detentions at Guantanamo Bay, and of institutions like Columbia University working with police departments to end peaceful protests. At other institutions faculty have been fired and students have been suspended or even expelled in an effort to placate the state and their own wealthy donors.

Trump is not just claiming a right to deport non-citizens who exercise their rights to speak and assemble freely, but he is continuing the Biden administration’s commitment to ethnic cleansing in Gaza, while Israel continues bombing and cutting off water and electricity, which are war crimes by definition, and in violation of a ceasefire agreement. Like other presidents, Trump is bombing Ansar Allah and civilians in Yemen to punish their steadfast solidarity with Palestine.  The Obama/Clinton initiative to destroy the Syrian Republic has also come to fruition, with the leader of Al Qaeda in Syria now ruling the country. At the same time, his multinational force of Takfiri-Wahhabi-Salifist extremists slaughters Alawite, Shia and Christian Syrians in the thousands.

Palestine is not the only point of contention that drives the state to repress speech. The Uhuru 3 were indicted by the Biden Department of Justice, accused of being Russian agents when they spoke against the proxy war in Ukraine. They were ultimately acquitted, but their case exemplified the commitment to silence individuals and movements who speak out against U.S. imperialism. The most common form of repression in the U.S. is the police state, as in Chicago, where the local police department ran a black site prison, Homan Square, with the help of the Justice Department under the Obama, Trump, and Biden presidencies.

Trump’s deportations in violation of court orders are a new threat to human rights. But Guantanamo Bay still holds prisoners, and the Patriot Act has been renewed several times since it was first passed in 2001.

UNAC demands freedom for Mahmoud Khalil and others repressed for exercising their rights to speak and assemble freely, an end to genocide and wars of aggression, and the end of university complicity in the suppression of political speech.

Free Palestine!

Stop Deportations!

Free all Political Prisoners!

Defend the Human Rights of Free Speech and Assembly!

Stop Imperialist Aggression!

_____________________________

17 March 2025

Source: nepajac.org

By Quds News Network

Gaza (Quds News Network)- More than 70 Palestinian civilians have been killed in Israeli airstrikes targeting multiple areas across the Gaza Strip, as Israel continues its bombardment of the enclave since Tuesday morning, resuming its genocidal war and violating the ceasefire agreement.

Local and medical sources have confirmed that more than 70 civilians have been killed so far, with the death toll expected to rise as many remain trapped under the rubble.

In Beit Lahiya, over 15 members of the Abu Halima family were killed after their home was targeted. The majority of the strikes have focused on Khan Younis, where 15 members of the Abu Dakka family lost their lives, most of them children.

[https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1902616568564969914]

[https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1902608748327162153]

According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, more than 700 Palestinians have been killed and over 900 others injured since the Israeli assault on Gaza began on Tuesday.

Israel Kills 17 Civilians at Funeral Tent in Northern Gaza

At least 17 Palestinians were killed and 32 others injured on Wednesday evening when an Israeli airstrike targeted a funeral tent in Al-Sultan neighborhood of Beit Lahia, northern Gaza Strip.

Israel carried out the attack as mourners were breaking their fast during Ramadan. Eyewitnesses described the strike as sudden and direct, targeting elderly mourners and children. Horrific scenes from the site were captured on camera, showing the extent of the devastation.

[https://twitter.com/qudsn/status/1902427637680632187]

[https://twitter.com/qudsn/status/1902408454859301101]

In a separate strike, Israeli warplanes bombed a home in Beit Hanoun, killing four women and children. Footage showed rescuers pulling their bodies from the rubble.

The Ministry of Health reported that the death toll from Israeli attacks since Tuesday morning has risen to 436, with 678 others injured. The total number of Palestinians killed since October 7, 2023, has now reached 49,547, with 112,719 wounded.

Israel resumed its genocidal war on Gaza early Tuesday morning, launching intense airstrikes across the strip. The attacks, which targeted civilians during pre-dawn meals, marked the official collapse of a ceasefire agreement brokered by Qatar, Egypt, and the United States in January.

20 March 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By The Chris Hedges Report

Israel has begun the final stage of its genocide. The Palestinians will be forced to choose between death or deportation. There are no other options.

22 Mar 2025 – This is the last chapter of the genocide. It is the final, blood-soaked push to drive the Palestinians from Gaza. No food. No medicine. No shelter. No clean water. No electricity. Israel is swiftly turning Gaza into a Dantesque cauldron of human misery where Palestinians are being killed in their hundreds and soon, again, in their thousands and tens of thousands, or they will be forced out never to return.

The final chapter marks the end of Israeli lies. The lie of the two-state solution. The lie that Israel respects the laws of war that protect civilians. The lie that Israel bombs hospitals and schools only because they are used as staging areas by Hamas. The lie that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, while Israel routinely forces captive Palestinians to enter potentially bobby trapped tunnels and buildings ahead of Israeli troops. The lie that Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ) are responsible — the charge often being errant Palestinian rockets — for the destruction of hospitals, United Nations’ buildings or mass Palestinian casualties. The lie that humanitarian aid to Gaza is blocked because Hamas is hijacking the trucks or smuggling in weapons and war material. The lie that Israeli babies are beheaded or Palestinians carried out mass rape of Israeli women. The lie that 75 percent of the tens of thousands killed in Gaza were Hamas “terrorists.” The lie that Hamas, because it was allegedly rearming and recruiting new fighters, is responsible for the breakdown of the ceasefire agreement.

Israel’s naked genocidal visage is exposed. It has ordered the evacuation of northern Gaza where desperate Palestinians are camped out amid the rubble of their homes. What comes now is mass starvation — the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said on March 21 it has six days of flour supplies left — deaths from diseases caused by contaminated water and food, scores of killed and wounded each day under the relentless assault of bombs, missiles, shells and bullets. Nothing will function, bakeries, water treatment and sewage plants, hospitals — Israel blew up the damaged Turkish-Palestinian hospital on March 21 — schools, aid distribution centers or clinics. Less than half of the 53 emergency vehicles operated by the Palestine Red Crescent Society are functional due to fuel shortages. Soon there will be none.

TO CONTINUE READING Go to Original – chrishedges.substack.com

24 March 2025

Source: transcend.org

By Nicholas Jones

20 Feb 2025 – The current state of the world has cause for serious optimism as we bare witness to the arrival and reprisal of new and old actors on the global stage; actors that are capable of changing the present, somewhat drastic reality, into a shared future for humanity that will bring about more economic prosperity and faces the very real chance of eradicating major conflicts and poverty on planet earth for all citizens.

Open vs Closed Systems

The names above are pretty obvious in their setting, but we need to open up the major differences that separate the truly “sovereign” nations from the NATO Hegemon and its Vassal states. Initial factors that divide these two powers are easy to highlight; One seeks development while the other seeks domination, One aims to enslave and ensnare others into its economic system, while the other aims to cooperate and embolden one another in economic projects seeking win-win results. We continue – One uses its military might to corner and threaten weaker actors on the world stage, while the other uses its military for defensive obligations, scientific research and for civilian technological developments. This increases its ability to defend from the Hegemon, practicing a policy of restraint, while conflicts caused by these external actors, arise on their borders.

By now we should be getting a sense of what nations represent which system – China, Russia and Iran represent the Sovereigns while the U.S.A and its NATO vassals represent the closed minded Oligarchy, that has its roots firmly entrenched in the dark age mentality of the crusades – a world war battle of might makes right – not forgetting using faith based mythology as the literature for the war cry. Hardly the image of man that Jesus Christ or Plato envisioned.

The Path Is Closed for the Hegemon

NATO or the Anglo-American five eyes surveillance state, created it seems in the image of Sauron – the all-seeing eye of Mordor – stands exposed at the top of the world alter from which it has lectured others for so many years now. Since 1991 when this observer was born, there have been over 20 major conflicts initiated by the Anglo-American-Zionist hydra state and this has set the stage for the change we see today, a change, that if one truly believes that his fellow citizen is endowed with the same image that his creator bestowed upon himself, was inevitably going to arrive sooner rather than later. The Global South (Africa, ASEAN + South America) were never truly in lockstep with the Hegemon, but realized after many assassinations, regime change operations and outright invasions, that resisting the attempts of the Anglo-Americans to financially recolonize their nations, was futile, until an actor capable of challenging that closed system thinking of colonization and extortion, arrived on scene.

China arrived with much speed and grandeur thanks to her enormous population rooted in Confucian philosophy, while Mao’s CCP incorporated the imagery of socialism and not forgetting a Deng Xiaoping inspired economic renaissance, to bring about a rising tide that would lift all boats. This was not in opposition to the true western culture rooted in Platonic philosophy, but certainly opposed to the overly individualistic Aristotelian image presented by the Western Oligarchy, where democracy masks the overtly oligarchic intentions of our elite and has everyone divided into parties that achieve very little in the realm of physical development. One only need compare the almost Soviet-like bureaucracy of the E.U using Green politics to squander every economic breakthrough, with the ever expanding and scientifically developed economy of China that is largely responsible for most of the real intrinsic wealth creation in the world since the millennium. This is certainly true for Africa, hence why the path of colonization and extortion for economic gains, is now almost closed for the Anglo-American Empire.

(Below we have an image of the destruction of Libya when Hillary Clinton infamously cackled – “We came, we saw, he died” when talking about Muammar Qaddafi, the Pan-Africanist. This woman almost became president of the land of the free.)

TO CONTINUE READING Go to Original – risingtidefoundation.substack.org

24 March 2025

Source: transcend.org