Electronic Magazine On Global Politics, International Relations, History and World Security Since April 2014
My Lai is a shameful stain on the history of the U.S. military. The Secretary of the Army’s investigation led to courts-martial of many participants, for the civilian deaths or the cover up, most of which had to be dismissed for lack of evidence. Lt. Calley, the platoon leader at the center of the atrocity, was the only participant at My Lai found guilty and imprisoned […]
There is a doping double standard in American sports. The “big money” sports – football, baseball, and basketball – turn a blind eye to their athletes using performance-enhancing drugs while track – a “poor” sport – does not. This double standard is particularly harmful to track because strict testing procedures and subsequent doping scandals have led to a general decline of faith in the sport […]
The drumbeats of open hostility are growing louder, and soon we shall see how far Washington and London are prepared to go. And we shall also see for how long Moscow is prepared to accept their insults, their deployment of troops, warships and combat aircraft along Russia’s borders, and the growing level of relentless confrontation […]
The “official history” version has marked down the British as the first to recognise the “communist threat” in Eastern Europe, and that it was Winston Churchill who coined the phrase “Iron Curtain” in referring to actions of the communist-bloc countries of Eastern Europe and that he did this after the end of WWII […]
A new 1991 year started with a fear of the escalation of the political conflicts into a real war as on January 9th the Yugoslav collective Presidency issued order to disarm all paramilitary formations but firstly aimed at those in Croatia, especially the HDZ party’s militia – the Rally of National Guard (the ZNG) […]
So the moment we’ve been holding our breaths for a week finally came. In the end, I am mighty glad that this particular strike seems more like the impotent thrashing of the neocon snake that didn’t dare to attack places where Russian servicemen were likely to be killed, than it does the start of World War III. For the moment, at least, thank God […]
Russia is being surrounded. In such circumstances, if Russia strikes first, its enemies are the ones to blame. One can only hope that ‘the West’ (the US and its stooge-aristocracies) will back down, and finally end its incredibly dangerous attempt to conquer Russia – before the whole world gets ‘conquered’ into nuclear rubble […]
Humanity faces an unprecedented crisis with little effective means to stop what is coming. There are no elections: votes do not and will not count. Elections are fake, and this one is no different. Elections are digitally hacked, rigged, and scripted, rigged the way they have for decades. There is no real choice in this charade anyway. One candidate is clearly and emphatically criminal. The other is not trustworthy and may be compromised […]
The world may look upon U.S. internal politics as a descent into lunacy–an amusing sign of the complete failure of American democracy–but the outsider success of Bernie Sanders and even the anti-establishment revolt among the Republican grassroots shows that Americans are hungry for change. Both Hillary Clinton and the Republican establishment, with their Wall Street ties and militaristic solutions, do not command respect outside of certain limited segments of the population […]
One person with direct responsibility for transforming Dresden into the open-air crematorium, as the city was bombed by forbidden flammable bombs for massive destructions (Saddam Hussein was attacked in 2003 by the NATO’s alliance under the alleged and finally false accusation to possess exactly such weapons – WMD) is the “Bomber Harris” – a commander of the British Royal Air-Forces during the Dresden Raid […]
The Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal found all SS members to be war criminals who committed crimes against humanity. We then have to ask: Why is Marti Ahtisaari honoring and commemorating war criminals? These Finnish Nazi SS troops were involved in the Holocaust and in genocide. Why isn’t this even news? Why doesn’t Marti Ahtisaari know what the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal held regarding the Waffen SS? Why is he so ignorant or indifferent? […]
The 1979 to 1989 period of the Mujahideen onslaught is often referred to as the ‘Soviet-Afghan War’ because of the Soviet army’s heavy involvement. Although it is true that they were heavily involved, it is not an entirely accurate descriptor because it completely ignores the fact that it was a war that was actually crafted, instigated, and led by the United States […]
The destruction of Dresden, a world-famous cultural center of Baroque majesty, has been long dogged by controversy. Official British and American military accounts claim it was necessary to hasten the collapse of the Third Reich; with a reasoning that resonates with US claims for dropping the atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 […]
The aim of this article is to shed new light on the question of how the configuration of post-war Central and South-East Europe was shaped during WWII by the USSR through its relations with the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (the CPY). Relationships between the CPY and the Soviet Union in 1941−1945 depended on the concrete military situation in Europe, and on the diplomatic relationships between the Soviet Union and the other members of the anti-fascist Alliance […]
It is sometimes said that the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany was pyrrhic — a victory won at too great a cost. But much worse would have been the alternative of a triumphant Nazi empire in Europe that would have destroyed western democracy as well as Soviet socialism and completed Hitler’s genocide of the Jews […]
Regardless to the fact that a great part of the Americans did not support the 1983 Grenada Case that it took place only several days after a very disastrous terror act on the U.S. military post in Lebanon when over 240 U.S. troops were killed, calling into very question the use of the U.S. military force in order to achieve the political goals, Reagan’s administration officially proclaimed the case to be the first “rollback” of the Communist influence since the beginning of the Cold War in 1949 (as the U.S. military interventions against the “Communist infection” in Korea and Vietnam have been unsuccessful) […]
Yet ever since 9/11 magically appeared, as if the fufillment of a prophecy from out of the sacred book known as the Project For A New American Century, all the world’s generals, rulers and arms manufacturers seized the opportunity to turn that dasterdly moment of a new century into still another excuse for a perpetual war of terror against a whole host of new ‘hated ones’ who generally have non-white faces, of non-Christian and Jewish faiths or Western heritage […]
The United States is indisputably the world’s most frequent and extensive wager of aggressive war, largest occupier of foreign lands, and biggest weapons dealer to the world. But when the United States peeps out from under the blankets where it lies shivering with fear, it sees itself as an innocent victim […]
There’s a double standard in how the U.S. mainstream media reports civilian deaths depending if the U.S. military is fighting the wars or not, accepting absurdly low numbers when the U.S. is at fault and hyping death tolls when “enemies” are involved, a manipulation of human tragedy, says Nicolas J. S. Davies […]
This international war-crime, of “aggression” against a sovereign state — or, in common parlance, unprovoked aggression, for conquest — is now clear, and will be fully documented in the following news-report, providing the evidence for the prosecution of those three Governments, in an appropriate forum […]
It is usually and generally considered that the end of the USSR and its East European allied states ended the Cold War as a crucial feature of international relations and global politics in the second half of the 20th century. However, in reality, the Cold War was not over in 1989, according to the Western approach, as it was over only its first or original stage and feature (the Cold War 1.0) […]
Rape of Vietnamese women by US troops “took place on such a large scale that many veterans considered it standard operating procedure.” It was “systematic and collective”; an “unofficial military policy”. One soldier termed it a “mass military policy.” Indeed, rape followed by murder of Vietnamese women was “so common that American soldiers had a special term for the soldiers who committed the acts in conjunction: a double veteran” […]
In one of its most serious omissions, the series gives short shrift to the destruction wreaked by the US military’s spraying of deadly chemical herbicides containing the poison dioxin over much of Vietnam, the most common of which was Agent Orange. This is one of the most tragic legacies of the war […]
The US did donate many billions of dollars to rebuild Europe. The Marshall Plan, however, excluded the Soviet Union. It excluded Belarus, which had suffered the largest losses of any nation in WWII, 25% of its population. It excluded Russia, which lost 13%. But those weren’t nations, they were states within the USSR, the nation that lost by far the highest percentage of its population of any nation, to the war: nearly 14% […]
Fifty years ago today, in 1967, nearly 100,000 Americans marched on Washington, DC, to protest the Vietnam War. In those days there was a mandatory draft in place, and the risk was very real that a young man just out of high school could quickly wind up 13,000 miles away, fighting an unseen enemy in jungles that didn’t need tanks or B-52 bombers to inflict fear […]
For the past almost 16 years, the United States has been systematically destroying a region of the globe, bombing Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Syria, not to mention the Philippines. The United States has “special forces” operating in two-thirds of the world’s countries and non-special forces in three-quarters of them […]
In order for privately controlled arms-producers to thrive, there is just as much of a need for ‘allies’ as for ’targets’, because without targets, there can be no authorized markets, since every weapon is useless if it has no authorized target against which it may be used. There consequently needs to be at least one ‘enemy’ for any country whose arms-production is privately instead of publicly controlled. Both ‘allies’ and ‘enemies’ are needed, in order for America’s arms-makers to continue flourishing […]
The process of gradual collapsing of Tito’s SFRY which was finally ended in the total destruction of the country followed by bloody civil war, ethnic cleansing and forms of genocide, started a lesser than a year after Tito’s death in south Serbia’s autonomous province of Kosovo-Metochia where Muslim Albanians in March 1981 organized massive political demonstrations against both republican Government of Serbia and a Federal Government of Yugoslavia […]
It seems American strategists have studied the Chinese paper thoroughly. They are engaging in most of those forms of warfare against Russia and are planning to use other forms as well, including legal, social, psychological, and cultural as well as military and economic means. The various “sanctions” laws against Russia are examples of the use of quasi-legal methods as a form of warfare. The scandal concocted out of whole cloth about Russia undermining western ‘democracy” and President Trump’s dealings with Russians are another aspect of this warfare […]
In June of this year, the U.S. led a campaign to retake the city of Raqqa from ISIS fighters while the Russian and Syrian militaries were also attempting to do the same thing. In the first week of fighting, U.N. war crimes investigators warned that the U.S. had already killed 300 civilians from air strikes alone in that seven day period […]
The anti-Russian coalition hadn’t then achieved all its objectives, but Greenwald already discerned the ambitions of a ‘deep state’. ‘There really is, at this point,’ he said ‘obvious open warfare between this unelected but very powerful faction that resides in Washington and sees presidents come and go, on the one hand, and the person that the American democracy elected to be the president on the other’ […]
The fascist coup in Ukraine resulted in a genocidal civil war when the people of Novorossia (the Donbass region of Ukraine) seceded from Ukraine and to the amazement of the world managed with Russian assistance to smash the NATO backed Ukrainian army and their fascist death squad allies attempt to crush the Novorossiyan revolt […]
Never had so many people been put in prison. The size of the Allied captures was unprecedented in all history. The Soviets took prisoner some 3.5 million Europeans, the Americans about 6.1 million, the British about 2.4 million, the Canadians about 300,000, the French around 200,000. Uncounted millions of Japanese entered American captivity in 1945, plus about 640,000 entering Soviet captivity […]
The American Civil War, that is usually considered to be ended in 1865, in fact, according to the legal process of implementation of democratic civil rights, proclaimed by the US’ federal government during the war, ended only in 1965 with the Voting Rights Act. What happened in 1865 was just a formal legal attempt by Washington to force the southern states to accept the policy of civil rights and racial equality between African Americans and White Americans but, in practice, the realization of such legal action took a whole century of time […]
Neither Trump nor Obama can compete for the title of Supreme Fabulist on World War One – an honorific that President Woodrow Wilson locked up a century ago. After he was narrowly re-elected in 1916 based on a campaign slogan, “He kept us out of war,” Wilson pulled America into the war because “the world must be made safe for democracy” […]
The sense that Thaci and his close associates are protected and untouchable has created what many observers in Kosovo describe as a sense of hopelessness. If anyone is to prosecute Thaci it would almost certainly have to be international prosecutors. Since 2008 EULEX has been the most powerful judicial force in Kosovo, which declared independence the same year. Thaci’s opponents and critics hope that EULEX prosecutors will aggressively investigate the prime minister […]
One thing is certain: we will not survive another 100 years of this. Long before then, we will have to try something else. One thing that could help keep us out of more wars is the Trump face now placed on the wars. People who will hate Russia because they hate Trump may at some point oppose Trump’s wars because they hate Trump. And those getting active to support refugees may also want to help end the crimes that create the refugees […]
“Trump thought last month’s attack on Syria had bought him immunity, or at least a respite, from the wrath of the War Party” Obama’s former lawyers at United to Protect Democracy understand that Americans demand only that politicians use pretty words to justify the barbarities committed in their name. If you stick with the formula, the template, and make Americans feel exceptional, then you can bomb the hell out of the rest of the world, at will […]
Suffering and murder of little Serbian Christian girl Jovana (11) in Klecka village. Members of Serbian police have arrested the two villains. The Mazreku brothers admitted and described the crimes that were committed in Klecka, and what they did to little Orthodox Christian girl Jovana. All this was recorded by Judge Danica Marinkovic; they took statements, the cameras filmed the crime scene and the villains […]
It is reproduced a year-by-year timeline of America’s wars, which reveals something quite interesting: since the United States was founded in 1776, she has been at war during 214 out of her 235 calendar years of existence. In other words, there were only 21 calendar years in which the U.S. did not wage any wars since 1776 to 2015 […]
The concept here is “War of Aggression” in Wikipedia, whose article makes clear that certain types of invasions, such as in boundary-dispute cases, do not constitute a war-crime. That article cites a statement from the Nuremberg Tribunal: “To initiate a war of aggression … is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Lying about the cause for invading is almost invariably an important part of that “accumulated evil.” Hitler was infamous for doing it. Did the U.S. do this on April 14th? […]
It is the Unlimited Imperialists along the lines of Alexander, Rome, Napoleon and Hitler who are now in charge of conducting American foreign policy. The factual circumstances surrounding the outbreaks of both the First World War and the Second World War currently hover like twin Swords of Damocles over the heads of all humanity […]
Remember that Barack Obama, Theresa May, Angela Merkel, François Hollande, Justin Trudeau and Matteo Renzi were eloquent about the Aleppo airstrikes and lamented emotionally that «the images of dying children are heart-breaking». But they don’t say a word about the hideous slaughter in Mosul. It’s just a collateral massacre. What a bunch of hypocrites […]
In Okinawa, US troops are estimated to have raped 10,000 Japanese women during World War II. After World War II, 300 “sex crimes” were committed by US troops. From 1945 to 1950, 278 rapes were reported to have been committed by US troops on Okinawa based on police reports, including the rape of a nine-month-old Japanese girl in 1949. In 1955, a US soldier kidnapped, raped, and murdered a six-year-old Okinawa girl. Since 1972, 130 rapes by US occupation troops have been reported in Okinawa […]
Martti Ahtisaari, as President of Finland, sought to honor and commemorate Finnish Nazi SS war criminals, war criminals held guilty by the Nuremberg Tribunal of committing crimes against humanity and of participation in the Final Solution, the genocide of European Jews. This supporter and financier of Nazi war criminals and of genocide is deciding the future status of Kosovo? The irony is unbelievable […]
The chemical poisoning of civilians in Syria has proved a boon and a blessing for the West’s militarists who energetically seek confrontation with Russia — and with China and any other countries that might pop up on their screens of raging aggression. Nobody doubts for an instant that chemical agents are vile and that anyone using them offensively should be severely punished […]
Since World War II, the United States has engaged in an almost unbroken chain of major and minor wars in distant and poorly understood countries. Yet for a meddlesome superpower that claims the democratic high ground, it can sometimes be shockingly incurious and self-absorbed. In the case of the bombing of North Korea, its people never really became conscious of a major war crime committed in their name […]
Many Vietnam veterans suffered from PTSD. Many died before their time, some shortly after coming home, others years or even decades later, in their 30s or even in their 50s, not necessarily from physical injuries, but often from the invisible damage they’d incurred during the war. I never met any who considered themselves “heroes” […]
America’s shames are instead that America is today the world’s most aggressive, rabidly invasion-prone and coup-perpetrating country; and, in our past, slavery used to be accepted here. But, likewise, here as there, the shames are not against the general public: slavery was brought to this country and enforced by King George III, and polls generally show that the American public is far more inclined to avoid invasions than to seek them. In this country, just like in Germany, the atrocities come from the leadership-class, not from the public (regardless of what the aristocrats who own the publishing-houses might prefer to publish as constituting ‘history’ on the subject) […]
Did you know that Putin, who has refrained from responding aggressively to US provocations, not out of fear, but out of respect for human life, is said to be hellbent on reconstructing the Soviet Empire? Yet, when Putin sent a Russian force against the US and Israeli trained and supplied Georgian army that Washington sent to attack South Ossetia, the Russian Army conquered Georgia in five hours; yet withdrew after teaching the morons the lesson […]
German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung reviewed a book called “Reparation Debt Mortgages of German Cccupation in Greece and Europe”, in which historian Karl Heinz Roth and researcher Hartmut Rubner, present documents of the dispute and conclude that, even though Berlin claims the war reparations issue was resolved in 1960, in fact nothing has been done about it […]
The great historian Howard Zinn reminds us of it all: Our country’s history began in the genocide of indigenous nations and the enslavement of Africans brought here in chains. But from that beginning it also became a country of people’s movements against genocide and slavery, against racism and misogyny and Islamophobia, of movements for justice, for internationalism, and yes, for peace […]
The war machine that is the United States of America, not content with threatening the world with its missile attack on a Syria airbase, not content with massing its forces around the Korean Peninsular and threatening to murder its leaders and massacre its people, not content with its escalating hostility towards Russia and China, decided the world needed one more demonstration of its power today, Thursday, April 13 by dropping its most powerful non-nuclear bomb on an Afghanistan saturated with its bombs […]
Hillary Clinton’s comparison of President Putin to Adolf Hitler in a speech in California in March is the most striking example of this willingness to adopt the most extreme possible language, even by senior figures in government. Diplomats and media follow the same course, squawking about a “New Cold War” and seeking the most alarmist possible interpretation of every Russian action […]
First, we should put the issue of Srebrenica in some sort of general framework. As with most unspontaneous events, special operations mounted to achieve some political effect, Srebrenica is a purposely a multilayered affair. As an American scholar who has devoted an inordinate amount of time to Srebrenica, Prof. Edward Herman, has put it, far from being a straightforward story “Srebrenica symbolizes the triumph of propaganda at the end of the twentieth century” […]
Blaming Russian propaganda, however, has suddenly become a lot more difficult thanks to Mr. Noreika’s own granddaughter, Silvia Foti, a Lithuanian-American from Chicago who has spent years researching a biography of her revered relative and went public in July with her shocking conclusion: Her grandfather was a fierce anti-Semite and Nazi collaborator […]
If this peaceful path to ending the prelude to WW III — to avoiding the jump off a nuclear cliff — succeeds, then the world will be able to continue debating who was right and who was wrong in all of this. But, otherwise, that debate will simply be terminated by the war itself, and everyone will end up losing […]
On April 6 news reports revealed that the Pentagon had fired nearly 60 long-range cruise missiles from a U.S. Navy Destroyer into the Sharyat airbase in Syria. This blatant act of aggression was said to be in response to the deaths of people from a putative chemical weapons attack a few days earlier in the village of Khan Sheikhou […]
If the US makes a nuclear attack on North Korea, the megalomaniacal, narcissistic and seemingly frighteningly ill informed Donald Trump – who, in an early telephone call to President Putin was reported as having to put his hand over the mouthpiece and ask someone what the START Treaty (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) was – could trigger the unimaginable […]
John McCain is only a “hero” in the settler-colonialist mind. By the letter of the law, he was a war criminal. We Americans may praise McCain for opposing Bush-era waterboarding, or for standing up to the bigot who called Obama a Muslim at a campaign rally, or for casting the deciding vote that saved millions of Americans’ health insurance […]
The US post-WWII imperialistic foreign policy of global hegemony is obviously not to be changed by a new 45th US President who only after three months obliterated all his electoral campaign promises to keep hands off from Syria and to finally stop with the American practice of interventionist policies across the world […]
March 16, 2017, was the 49th anniversary of the My Lai Massacre, located in Quang Ngai Province, Vietnam. It was Saturday morning, March 16, 1968, when approximately 115 U.S. Army soldiers of the Americal Division’s Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, landed in helicopters just outside the village of My Lai 4. Over the course of the next four hours, these American soldiers, and their Military High Command, who were flying overhead in helicopters observing the massacre, took part in a horror show far beyond the human imagination […]
The Bethlehem sanctuary issued a ringing reprisal Sunday of the coalition attack, going as far as barring US President George W. Bush, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and UK Foreign Minister Jack Straw from entering church grounds, due to their “aggressive war on Iraq” […]
Turning attention away from her and toward Donald J. Trump, Meryl Streep used her acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes to call out the president-elect for appearing to mock a disabled New York Times reporter in 2015, and warned that a free press would need to be defended. Ms. Streep campaigned for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election […]
Amyloidosis, Chronic B-cell Leukemias, Chloracne, Type II Diabetes Mellitus, Hodgkins Disease, Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, Ischemic Heart Disease, Multiple Myeloma, Parkinson’s Disease, Peripheral Neuropathy, Porphyria Cutanea Tarda, Prostate Cancer, Respiratory Cancers (including lung cancer), Hairy Cell Leukemia, Soft Tissue Sarcomas and spina bifida in infants of Agent Orange exposed Vietnam veterans […]
Instated at the outset of the Soviet-Afghan war and protected by the CIA, the drug trade developed over the years into a highly lucrative multibillion undertaking. It was the cornerstone of America’s covert war in the 1980s. Today, under US-NATO military occupation, the drug trade generates cash earnings in Western markets in excess of $200 billion dollars a year […]
The issue of War Crimes emerged after World War I at the Versailles Conference, but it was not until the end of World War II that a more comprehensive definition of what constitutes war crimes was developed. First among new international conventions addressing war crimes was the 1950 Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal. Its fundamental premise was that the conduct of war in violation of international treaties was a crime against peace […]
Washington’s objective is to impose the terms of Korea’s reunification. The NeoCons “Project for a New American Century” (PNAC) published in 2000 had intimated that in “post unification scenario”, the number of US troops (currently at 37,000) should be increased and that US military presence could be extended to North Korea. In a reunified Korea, the military mandate of the US garrison would be to implement so-called “stability operations in North Korea” […]
