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Journalist-scholar Gareth Porter has published another fine book on U.S. aggression, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, which follows in the footsteps of his 2005 study, The Perils of Dominance.
Steven Pinker’s new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, is a propaganda windfall for the leaders and supporters of the U.S. imperial state, currently engaged in multiple wars, with over 800 military bases across the globe, asserting and using the right to kill untried “terrorists” any place on earth and Read more…
The mainstream media (MSM) love something like the “9/11 ten-years-after” memorialization. It is an opportunity for a patriotic orgy, allowing a wallowing in sorrow at the human losses on September 11, 2001 and permitting editors and journalists to honor once more our fighting troops who have been out there pursuing the bad guys and protecting Read more…
We are in the midst of a counterrevolution and intensifying class war. What makes its present efflorescence so striking is that it is taking place under the presidency of Barack Obama, a man elected in good measure by an aroused mass base that is now taking its lumps. The power structure no longer permits serious Read more…
The upheavals in the Middle East have created acute problems for establishment officials and pundits, and their discomfiture, squirming, and gyrations have added further pleasure to the shifting political scene. "We" are allegedly strongly in favor of democracy and hostile to one-party rule and repression, but sometimes geopolitical calculations (also called "our interests") override this Read more…
Several decades ago, in The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (with Noam Chomsky, 1979) and The Real Terror Network (Herman, 1982), we gave great weight to the demand for a "favorable climate of investment" as a driving force in explaining U.S. policy in Third World countries. If the business community and its interests have Read more…
A sign on Harry Truman's desk, which read "The buck stops here," has been regularly invoked to showcase him as a model in accepting responsibility. But Harry Truman could avoid passing the buck because he was the President of the United States, for whom impunity starts here (my phrase). Thus, he could drop atomic bombs Read more…
Book by Germinal Civikov, translated from the German by John Laughland; Belgrade, Srebrenica Historical Project, 2010, 164 pp. This book is a devastating indictment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY, or Tribunal), showing clearly that the ICTY "does not behave according to the traditions of the rule of law." It is Read more…
Lie-truths are lies that are so helpful to establishment interests that they swiftly become mainstream truths. They are also extremely hard to dislodge and can be repeated without serious journalistic work or risk of exposure. Sometimes they are eventually admitted to be lies, but usually long after they have served their immediate ends, and unaccompanied Read more…
In 1995, a senior Clinton administration official, commenting on Indonesian President Suharto, then on a state visit to Washington, referred to him as "our kind of guy." He was speaking about a brutal and thieving dictator and double genocidist (first in Indonesia, then East Timor), but one whose genocide in Indonesia terminated any left threat Read more…