The Peace Press — Wednesday, December 29, 2021 edition

“Careerists and Democratic Party apparatchiks successfully leverage corporate money and backing to seize and deform historic rights organizations into appendages of the ruling class.”

“Those in power, as Noam Chomsky points out, divide the world into “worthy” and “unworthy” victims. They weep crocodile tears over the plight of Uyghur Muslims persecuted in China while demonizing and slaughtering Muslims in the Middle East. They decry press censorship in hostile states and collude with the press censorship and algorithms emanating from Silicon Valley in the United States.

It is an old and insidious game, one practiced not to promote human rights or press freedom but to envelop these courtiers to power in a sanctimonious and cloying self-righteousness. PEN America can’t say the words “Belarus,” “Myanmar” or the Chinese tennis star “Peng Shuai” fast enough, while all but ignoring the most egregious assault on press freedom in our lifetime.”

“https://consortiumnews.com/2021/12/27/chris-hedges-pen-america-uncoils-rope-to-get-assange/
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“Julian Assange is one of the political prisoners that the US claims not to have. The UK is again the good vassal, keeping him locked up until the Biden administration finds an opportune time to ship him off to a kangaroo court. Everyone who believes in press freedom and who opposes imperialism must be a staunch Assange defender.”

https://blackagendareport.com/why-we-must-defend-julian-assange
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The Committee to Protect Journalists — — — — just another propaganda-tool to justify U.S. Imperialist actions while denying any real protection to those journalists who challenge U.S. Imperialist power. We are supposed to remember that only other nations imprison journalists……….what a bunch of bullshit!!!!

“Held in London’s Belmarsh maximum-security prison since April 2019, the U.S. government continues to pursue Assange’s extradition on the basis of 18 charges connected with Wikileaks’ publication in 2010 of hundreds of thousands of leaked classified documents revealing war crimes and human rights violations that have never been prosecuted,” RSF acknowledged.

https://thedissenter.org/cpj-still-excludes-assange-jailed-journalist-index/
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“The message sent to journalists could not be clearer or more chilling: what happened to Assange could happen to you too.”

“It is no accident that Julian Assange, the digital transparency activist and journalist who founded WikiLeaks to help whistleblowers tell us what western governments are really up to in the shadows, has spent 10 years being progressively disappeared into those very same shadows.

His treatment is a crime similar to those WikiLeaks exposed when it published just over a decade ago hundreds of thousands of leaked materials — documents we were never supposed to see — detailing war crimes committed by the United States and Britain in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

https://original.antiwar.com/cook/2021/12/28/the-hounding-of-julian-assange-leaves-honest-journalism-with-no-refuge/
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“The world had descended into a 77-Year War, incepting with the mobilization of the armies of old Europe in August 1914. If you want to count bodies, 150 million were killed by all the depredations that germinated in the Great War, its foolish aftermath at Versailles, and the march of history into World War II and the Cold War that followed inexorably thereupon.

Upwards of 8% of the human race was wiped out during that span. The toll encompassed the madness of trench warfare during 1914–1918; the murderous regimes of Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism that rose from the ashes of the Great War and the follies of Versailles; and then the carnage of WWII and all the lesser (unnecessary) wars and invasions of the Cold War including Korea and Vietnam.

At the end of the Cold War, therefore, the last embers of the fiery madness that had incepted with the guns of August 1914 had finally burned out. Peace was at hand. Yet 30 years later there is still no peace because Imperial Washington confounds it.

In fact, the War Party entrenched in the nation’s capital is dedicated to economic interests and ideological perversions that guarantee perpetual war. These forces ensure endless waste on armaments; they cause the inestimable death and human suffering that stems from 21st-century high-tech warfare; and they inherently generate terrorist blowback from those upon whom the War Party inflicts its violent hegemony.

Worse still, Washington’s great war machine and teeming national security industry is its own agent of self-perpetuation. When it is not invading, occupying and regime changing, its vast apparatus of internal policy bureaus and outside contractors, lobbies, think tanks and NGOs is busy generating reasons for new imperial ventures.”

https://original.antiwar.com/David_Stockman/2021/12/26/the-christmas-truce-of-1914-why-there-is-still-no-peace-on-earth-3/
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“As the Russian president’s year-end presser helped underscore, Europe will increasingly understand itself as the western end of Eurasia rather than the eastern shore of the Atlantic.”

https://consortiumnews.com/2021/12/28/patrick-lawrence-putin-speaks/
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“Christmas 2021 looked a lot like Christmas last year and the year before. Wars and rumors of war circling the planet. With America amid most of them. Washington’s War Party naturally wanted the US to confront China and Russia, threaten Iran, disarm North Korea, protect worthless yet contested rocks throughout the Pacific, kill terrorists the world over, and ensure that none of its allies need inconvenience themselves by doing anything for themselves. Such was Uncle Sam’s gift to the world, courtesy Americans’ lives and wealth.

Unsurprisingly, Washington’s supposed friends helpfully pushed the US into their fights. The United Kingdom is perhaps America’s worst BFF in this regard.”

https://original.antiwar.com/doug-bandow/2021/12/26/will-christmas-2022-be-any-different-from-this-year/
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The supposed coming Russian invasion of Ukraine — — -yet another example of corporate media PROPAGANDA from the New York Times, the Washington Post and almost every Engish-speaking periodical, newspaper or magazine in the West. Are you so naive as to believe the Russians or the Chinese are out to get us or that “us” vs. “them” even exists?

“How to explain the silence of the corporate media on the troop pullout? One can imagine the reaction of the eggnog-ed elite running our foreign-policy/media strategy upon hearing the news. “Another Russian dirty trick, announcing this on Christmas day! Who is in good shape enough to prepare our customary press guidance? You know, our Daily Memo for the Media? We also need to focus on what subtle treachery lies behind this ostensibly conciliatory move by Russia.”

Apparently, no one was up to the challenge. Without the customary Memo for the Media, the stenographers posing as journalists for the New York Times and the Washington Post were at sea. You can almost hear them making excuses for those from whom they receive dictation: “Hey, it’s Christmas; surely this hard-to-explain news can wait a day or two. We, all of us, need to put the right spin on this gambit from the outset.” And so, as of this writing, not a word yet in the NYT or Washington Post.”

https://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2021/12/26/what-no-russian-invasion-of-ukraine/
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“It’s an indisputable fact: Washington leads the world in self-delusion.

Washington’s political class is poised to march into a hurricane of its own making in Ukraine, a perfect storm of foreign- and defense-policy blunders likely to plunge the American people into future crises and conflicts. Having refused to acknowledge Russia’s vital strategic interest in Ukraine, Washington now wants to subject Ukraine and the NATO alliance to a dangerous and unnecessary test by confronting Russian conventional military power. In turn, Washington and its allies now face a test — one that they could have avoided but are now likely to fail.”

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/washington-prepares-to-fail-in-ukraine/
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“With no mention of what was causing the crisis, or what kind of help was actually needed, Pannell’s report had the effect of painting the US as a benevolent actor that just wasn’t doing quite enough to address a largely inevitable situation.”

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/12/27/corporate-media-ignore-us-sanctions-driving-starvation-threat-afghanistan
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“Most Americans blame Moscow, but the United States and its NATO allies are largely responsible for the onset of the current, dangerous confrontation. Tensions have intensified gradually over the past three decades, although some episodes stand out as especially important. George W. Bush’s successful push to expand NATO to include the Baltic republics, and his even more brazen (albeit unsuccessful) effort to gain membership for Georgia and Ukraine, greatly antagonized Russia. Barack Obama’s administration topped that provocation by assisting demonstrators to overthrow Ukraine’s elected, pro-Russian president in 2014. Vladimir Putin’s government responded to that gross intrusion into Russia’s security zone by annexing Crimea, thereby guaranteeing continued access to his country’s vital naval base at Sevastopol. Washington’s ongoing campaign to make Ukraine a U.S. military pawn and Moscow’s efforts to thwart that maneuver have brought the renewed East-West animosity to a climax.

However, one party that has not received sufficient blame for this ugly situation is Bill Clinton’s administration. The arrogant, menacing policies that the Clinton foreign policy team pursued started the tragic descent to a new cold war. The 1990s could have become the decade in which an enlightened US policy facilitated Russia’s political and economic integration into the democratic West. It also could have been the decade in which NATO was given the retirement party it had earned, Western Europe finally took responsibility for its own defense through a new “Europeans only” security organization, and Central and Eastern Europe became a neutral zone that respected Russia’s economic and military interests.

Instead, the Clinton administration insisted on not only perpetuating a U.S-dominated NATO, but pushing the Alliance to expand toward Russia. “

https://original.antiwar.com/Ted_Galen_Carpenter/2021/12/27/lost-opportunity-how-the-clinton-administration-started-a-cold-war-with-a-democratic-russia/
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“The virtual meeting between President Biden and Russian leader Vladimir Putin on December 7 didn’t resolve the crisis that began when Russian forces massed around Ukraine’s border, where they currently remain. But Biden’s readiness to engage in further talks with Russia in order to reach an unspecified “accommodation” provides an opportunity for diplomacy to avert a looming disaster.”

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/12/20/determined-diplomacy-can-prevent-war-in-eastern-europe/
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But in his day, King was considered a dangerous troublemaker. Both Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson worried that King was being influenced by Communists. King was harassed by the FBI and vilified in the media. The establishment’s campaign to denigrate King worked. In August 1966 — as King was bringing his civil rights campaign to Northern cities to address poverty, slums, housing segregation and bank lending discrimination — the Gallup Poll found that 63% of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of King, compared with 33% who viewed him favorably.

King called himself a democratic socialist. He believed that America needed a “radical redistribution of economic and political power.” He challenged America’s class system and its racial caste system. He opposed US militarism and imperialism, especially the country’s misadventure in Vietnam. He was a strong ally of the nation’s labor union movement. He was assassinated in April 1968 in Memphis, where he had gone to support a sanitation workers’ strike.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/12/25/martin-luther-king-was-radical-not-moderate
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Another year, another example of treason to the people. A trillion dollars a year wasted on a military that does this country more harm than good is a prime example of national treason to the people.

“With China being the Pentagon’s main focus, a good portion of the spending bill will go towards the research, development, testing, and evaluation for new weapons technology, known as RDT&E. The NDAA authorizes over $117 billion for RDT&E, which will be used to develop hypersonic weapons, artificial intelligence, space and cyber capabilities, and other advanced weaponry.”

https://news.antiwar.com/2021/12/27/biden-signs-778-billion-ndaa-into-law/
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Treason to the people:

“Why is there more money for the military-industrial complex… at the same time the U.S. is refusing to spend the $25 billion needed to make enough additional vaccines to vaccinate the world?”

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/12/27/pentagon-just-got-778-billion-usaid-running-out-money-covid-19-vaccines
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“The Soviet Union ceased to exist 30 years ago, and with its disappearance the United States embraced a triumphalist interpretation of the end of the Cold War that has served to fuel its militarism for another generation. The loss of its major rival could have freed the US from the costly militarized foreign policy that it had pursued since the end of WWII, but instead it freed the US to act however it liked in the world without regard for the consequences for itself or other countries. Desperate to find new causes to champion and new monsters to slay, the US appointed itself as the world’s armed enforcer and then professed bewilderment when the countries that it threatened resisted its “benevolent” leadership. US militarism should have died with the Soviet Union, but instead its supporters just went looking for new enemies.”

https://original.antiwar.com/Daniel_Larison/2021/12/28/us-militarism-should-have-died-with-the-soviet-union/
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“The U.S. military is supposedly there to protect people. It does the opposite.”

“As the US military continues construction of a controversial new base at Henoko Bay, Okinawa, the recent discovery of extreme levels of highly toxic “forever chemicals” in local waterways and groundwater has renewed long-standing opposition to the American occupation of large portions of the Japanese archipelago.”

“Imagine the uproar if China were responsible for this PFOS contamination. But since the US is to blame, it will be swept under the rug.”

https://original.antiwar.com/Brett_Wilkins/2021/12/28/alarming-levels-of-forever-chemicals-found-in-water-near-us-bases-in-okinawa/
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“The US has an increasing tendency to go back on its word and tear up agreements in a fit of pique or with changes in political power.”

“Our government has a real credibility problem in that our government’s promises to lift sanctions and make other concessions are not believable. This greatly complicates the ability of our negotiators to strike bargains with other governments to resolve outstanding disputes, because the U.S. has an increasing tendency to go back on its word or to tear up agreements in a fit of pique.”

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/12/24/washingtons-real-credibility-problem/