NB: A very instructive book on Soviet history is named The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939; by, J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov (1999). I think the current period of American history will be known as the implosion of the USA. All the engineered coups, from Iran to Vietnam to Chile, return to sender as a fast-moving coup takes place under your noses; all the instigation of civil wars in far-off countries, return to Washington; all your contempt for international law (remember the mining of Nicaraguan waters in 1984?) returns as contempt for the American Constitution. All the violence wreaked upon the globe, which still continues in the Palestinian genocide conducted by the American proxy Israel, returns to your ‘homeland’, which was seized by wiping out the Native American population.
Ladies and gents of the American establishment and your mindless followers: slavery, genocide and dreams of global domination have had their day. You can rectify history in the Smithsonian, but like Lady Macbeth, you will never wipe off the blood on your hands. And the Democratic party, whose leaders ordered the use of atom bombs, started the Vietnam War and refused to let Palestinian Americans even speak at Kamal Harris’ convention, after gifting $30 billion to Israel to massacre the population of Gaza – the Democrats need not congratulate themselves for their table manners. They’re no better than the mafiosi.
A caveat: I salute all American student protesters, scholars without ideological blinkers, war resisters and human rights activists who stood and still stand in defence of human rights and in solidarity with the victims of American and Zionist imperialism
At his confirmation hearing in 2018, one of your esteemed Justices of the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, responded furiously to a critic: “what goes round come round.” Yes sir, so it does indeed. What the USA did to the rest of the world over the past decades, it is doing to itself.
Here’s a telling quote from a book about Vietnam: Americans liked seeing people eye to eye, the General had once told me, especially as they screwed them from behind: Chapter 1 of The Sympathizer; by Viet Thanh Nguyen. All of you can look in the mirror now, as you get shafted by a draft-dodging criminal and con-man whom you elected. Maybe Putin has kompromat on Trump via beauty contests in Moskva; maybe Bibi Netanyahu has kompromat on him via Epstein.
Give him the Medal of Honor, nominate him for the Nobel Prize for Peace. Who cares?
Nobody did it to you. You shafted yourselves. Karma Cola. What goes round come round. DS
Trump’s ominous move to recruit generals and admirals to his political cause
Behold. The festering carcass of American rot shoved into an ill-fitting suit: the sleaze of a conman, the cowardice of a draft dodger, the gluttony of a parasite, the racism of a Klansman, the sexism of a back-alley creep, the ignorance of a bar-stool drunk, and the greed of a hedge-fund ghoul—all spray-painted orange and paraded like a prize hog at a county fair. Not a president. Not even a man. Just the diseased distillation of everything this country swears it isn’t but has always been—arrogance dressed up as exceptionalism, stupidity passed off as common sense, cruelty sold as toughness, greed exalted as ambition, and corruption worshiped like gospel. It is America’s shadow made flesh, a rotting pumpkin idol proving that when a nation kneels before money, power, and spite, it doesn’t just lose its soul—it shits out this bloated obscenity and calls it a leader ― Oliver Kornetzke
Chris Hedges: Trump’s War on America: Those who defy the state will, I expect, be decapitated one by one. The forlorn hope that the state will tolerate those who obey will silence many who have already been condemned. “Universal innocence,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes in The Gulag Archipelago, “also gave rise to the universal failure to act. Maybe they won’t take you? Maybe it will all blow over.”
“The majority sit quietly and dare to hope,” he writes. “Since you aren’t guilty, then how can they arrest you? It’s a mistake!” “Does hope lend strength or does it weaken a man?” Solzhenitsyn asks. “If the condemned man in every cell had ganged up on the executioners as they came in and choked them, wouldn’t this have ended the executions sooner than appeals to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee? When one is already on the edge of the grave, why not resist?”
“But wasn’t everything foredoomed anyway, from the moment of arrest?” he asks. “Yet all the arrested crawled along the path of hope on their knees, as if their legs had been amputated.”
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From colonialism to Covid: Viet Thanh Nguyen on the rise of anti-Asian violence
Biden Is the Latest President to Tout the Vietnam War as Proud History
Donald Trump’s Cultural Revolution
The Billionaire Frenzy Over Zohran Mamdani
Chris Hedges: The Rule of Idiots
The US left Vietnam 50 years ago today. The media hasn’t learned its lesson
Vietnam’s Village of Moroccan Defectors
Henry Kissinger was the definition of elite impunity
Roaming Charges: Kissinger – the Dr. Caligari of American Empire
‘No innocent civilians’: the Violent Legacies of the U.S. War in Vietnam
How the Vietnam and Gaza Wars Shattered Young Illusions About US Leaders
The US left Vietnam 50 years ago today. The media hasn’t learned its lesson
Vietnam’s Village of Moroccan Defectors
Joe Biden, the National Security State, and Arms Sales
Nouriel Roubini: The US is now the focus of global instability
Norman Solomon: How the Warfare State Paved the Way for a Trumpist Autocracy
The Geopolitics of Peace: Jeffrey Sachs in the European Parliament
Revisiting Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
How the trauma of the Vietnam War led to the age of “alternative facts”
Seymour Hersh on Witnessing American War Crimes in Vietnam
‘I sent them a good boy and they made him a murderer’
After the truth-shower 