Why Bahrain is not Syria →

By Pepe Escobar

How poignant that the first anniversary of a true Arab pro-democracy movement in the Persian Gulf - then ruthlessly crushed - falls on February 14, when Valentine’s Day is celebrated in the West. Talk about a doomed love affair.

And how does Washington honor this tragic love story? By resuming arms sales to the repressive Sunni al-Khalifa dynasty in power in Bahrain.

So just to recap; United States President Barack Obama told Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad to “step aside and allow a democratic transition to proceed immediately” while King Hamad al-Khalifa gets new toys to crack down on his subversively pro-democratic subjects.

Syria’s Uprising in Context →

Since the beginning of the unrest in Syria, “the government has said that while some protesters have legitimate grievances, the uprising is driven by militant Islamists with foreign backing.” [1] This hardly squares with the view of Western state officials and media commentators who say that an authoritarian regime is killing its people and violently suppressing a largely peaceful movement for democracy.

Who’s right?

How the Arab League Has Become a Tool of Western Imperialism →

“

The arrangement works like this: foment violence and instability within the country of choice, arm dissident groups, and direct these same groups with covert special forces; when government forces move to quell the insurrection, then accuse them of violating human rights. The Arab League then suspends the country, marking it out for international pariah status, which in turn provides a pretext for Western powers to mount military strikes, committing atrocities in the name of “responsibility to protect”, and engineering regime change in the interests of the Western powers. It’s neocolonialism in Arab lands – with the help of other Arab states…”

Americans to become sharecroppers in their own country as printed money boomerangs back to the developed world to buy up companies →

For decades , Asia has performed the role of diligent worker bee. Without a history of Adam Smith and free trade they saw how easy it was to game the free trade system. To this day, Koreans do not buy Japanese goods and Japanese do not buy Korean goods. Neither one will buy U.S. goods. The stuff they do want , like Hollywood movies, they just take. The U.S. took the brunt of the free trade economic carnage as over 50,000 factories have closed down in only the last ten years. No one can labor arbitrage and transfer price their taxes away like corporate America. We are still #1  in that game.

iPads, iPhones, iPocrisy →

The New York Times’ revealing series on why Apple produces most of its iPhones and iPads in China beautifully illustrates one of the defining dynamics of contemporary capitalism: abusive labor conditions in the overseas factories of US corporations are not, contrary to industry rhetoric, a problem to be solved; they are a highly prized driver of profitability.

How @alarabiya does interviews with protesters in #bahrain

http://twitpic.com/8cdo63 #feb14 #arabspring”

Al Arabiya is a Saudi-owned television channel.

(via readytodieforbahrain)

US moves ahead with military sales to Bahrain →

The United States is selling some military equipment to Bahrain as it walks a fine line between pushing the Sunni monarchy to open talks with the opposition while proceeding cautiously with a strategic ally to counter Iran.

Proxy War in Syria Threatens Catastrophe for the Middle East →

Fanning sectarian flames in Syria is especially dangerous. Like Iraq, Syria has a complex make-up of ethnic and religious groups that, if armed and manipulated, could easily lead to another Iraqi-style humanitarian tragedy. But the U.S. and its allies know no other form of intervention; divide and rule is a very effective way to overthrow a government.  What the U.S. and its allies have not fully considered is whether they can confine the potential devastation to Syria. 

Nigeria: Thrown into Chaos and a State of Civil War: The Role of the IMF →

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation and its largest oil producer, is from all evidence being systematically thrown into chaos and a state of civil war. The recent surprise decision by the government of Goodluck Jonathan to abruptly lift subsidies on imported gasoline and other fuel has a far more sinister background than mere corruption and the Washington-based International Monetary Fund (IMF) is playing a key role. China appears to be the likely loser along with Nigeria’s population.

Che Guevara

"He who feeds you, controls you"

Thomas Sankara, on refusing foreign aid

Thomas Sankara, President of Burkina Faso from 1983 to 1987 and nicknamed the “African Che Guevara”, launched the most ambitious program for social and economic change ever attempted on the African continent. To symbolize this new autonomy and rebirth, he even renamed the country from the French colonial Upper Volta to Burkina Faso (“Land of Upright Men”). His foreign policies were centered around anti-imperialism, with his government eschewing all foreign aid, pushing for odious debt reduction, nationalizing all land and mineral wealth, and averting the power and influence of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. His domestic policies were focused on preventing famine with agrarian self-sufficiency and land reform, prioritizing education with a nation-wide literacy campaign, and promoting public health by vaccinating 2.5 million children against meningitis, yellow fever and measles. Other components of his national agenda included planting over ten million trees to halt the growing desertification of the Sahel, doubling wheat production by redistributing land from feudal landlords to peasants, suspending rural poll taxes and domestic rents, and establishing an ambitious road and rail construction program to “tie the nation together.” On the localized level Sankara also called on every village to build a medical dispensary and had over 350 communities construct schools with their own labour. Moreover, his commitment to women’s rights led him to outlaw female genital mutilation, forced marriages and polygamy; while appointing females to high governmental positions and encouraging them to work outside the home and stay in school even if pregnant.

In order to achieve this radical transformation of society, he increasingly exerted authoritarian control over the nation, eventually banning unions and a free press, which he believed could stand in the way of his plans and be manipulated by powerful outside influences. To counter his opposition in towns and workplaces around the country, he also tried corrupt officials, counter-revolutionaries and “lazy workers” in peoples revolutionary tribunals. Additionally, as an admirer of Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution, Sankara set up Cuban-style Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs).

His revolutionary programs for African self-reliance as a defiant alternative to the neo-liberal development strategies imposed by the West, made him an icon to many of Africa’s poor. Sankara remained popular with most of his country’s impoverished citizens. However his policies alienated and antagonised the vested interests of an array of groups, which included the small but powerful Burkinabé middle class, the tribal leaders whom he stripped of the long-held traditional right to forced labour and tribute payments, and the foreign financial interests in France and their ally the Ivory Coast. As a result, he was overthrown and assassinated in a coup d’état led by the French-backed Blaise Compaoré on October 15, 1987. A week before his execution, he declared: “While revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you cannot kill ideas.”

Bertrand Russell on Palestine

“The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was “given” by a foreign power to another people for the creation of a new state. The result was that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people were made permanently homeless. With every new conflict their numbers increased. How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty? It is abundantly clear that the refugees have every right to the homeland from which they were driven, and the denial of this right is at the heart of the continuing conflict. No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled en masse from their country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate? A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East”.

Message from Bertrand Russell to the International Conference of Parliamentarians in Cairo, February 1970.” Reprinted in The New York Times, Feb. 23, 1970.

Why Not Attack Iran? →

The push to attack Iran has been on for so long that entire categories of arguments for it (such as that the Iranians are fueling the Iraqi resistance) have come and gone.

At DontAttackIran.org we’ve been collecting the arguments for and against attacking Iran for years. We’ve campaigned against an attack, but never been able to claim a success, because decisions not to launch wars are never announced, because those pushing for wars never give up, and because those believing what their government tells them think the Pentagon never campaigns for wars but is forced into them defensively on short notice by attacks from evildoers.