Geopolitical Outlook

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) recently published an official statement in response to comments made by former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, who called Kim Jong Un a "tyrant" (among other things) in a speech. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. presidential hopeful repeated the usual lies and slanders made against North Korea in Western media. Biden is a long time advocate of war against the DPRK and has said many times in the past that he would support a unilateral strike against them. In other words, he wants to turn the country into a 'charcoal briquette' (as Stephen Gowans describes several times), again, essentially repeating a piece of Cold War history wherein which the country in 1953 was violently burned to the ground and had 20 percent of its population exterminated (1.55 million massacred; their population was about 9 million in 1950). It was indeed a genocide, but of course it would be dismissed as such by imperialist media.  One should als...

Ben Norton recently published an article on The Grayzone  titled " New NATO-approved US monument honors fascist Lithuanian Nazi collaborator as anti-Soviet hero " (which I highly recommend reading). In this article, Norton comments on the monument that was recently unveiled in Chicago, which honours Lithuanian Nazi collaborator and unabashed anti-Soviet war hawk, Adolfas Ramanauskas (a.k.a. "Vanagas"). The ceremony for the unveiling, held on May 4th, honours Ramanauskas as a "freedom fighter" and a "hero", as Norton writes, Lithuania’s state-funded Genocide and Resistance Research Centre has spent the past nearly three decades fueling Holocaust revisionism by portraying Nazi-collaborating Lithuanian fascists who murdered Jews in the Holocaust as anti-communist resistance heroes, while depicting Jewish anti-fascist partisans as war criminals; and by advancing the “double genocide” theory that falsely equates Soviet atrocities with Nazi cr...

Below is an English translation of a 1936 article written by Nadezhda Krupskaya, the wife of Vladimir Lenin and a fellow Bolshevik revolutionary figure. She served as the Soviet Union's Deputy Minister of Education from 1929 until her death in 1939. This article is a reflection on Lenin, Stalin, Trotskyites, the Second International, and building socialism. She always did have a lot of respect for Joseph Stalin and it shows in this written piece; but it is not the only highlight of the article nor is it the only talking point. She talks about the hard work and dedication that went into building the Soviet Republic as well, and the early stages of developing a post-Tsarist Russia which had previously been a backward society that was seriously lagging behind in terms of technology and industry. She also provides a great deal of criticism of the Second International and its defense of Trotsky.  Now of course, neither Krupskaya nor her husband (who also criticized Leon Trotsky a g...

When it comes to war-torn Afghanistan and the role played by the United States and its NATO allies, what comes first to mind for most is the ‘War on Terror’ campaign launched in 2001 by George W. Bush almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks. And understandably so, considering that the United States and its allies established a direct “boots-on-the-ground” military presence in the country that year. Not only that, but during the Bush-Cheney years, there was an aggressive propaganda campaign being played out across U.S. media outlets which used women’s rights as one of the pretexts for the continued occupation. The irony of this, however, is not lost on those who understand that the conflict in Afghanistan has a long history which, much like Syria, stretches as far back as the Cold War era — especially when it was the United States that  provided support  for the Mujahideen in destabilizing the country and stripping away the modernizing, progressive economic and social gai...

Minnesota's Democratic representative and Congresswoman  Ilhan Omar has been making headlines lately because of the seemingly "anti-establishment" remarks she made in Washington and has become popular among some Western 'progressives', including feminist circles. Her comments included: criticizing AIPAC, calling out the state of Israel for its treatment of Palestinians (and rightly so), and calling Barack Obama a "pretty face who got away with murder". That is, until she backtracked -- as she usually does, which shouldn't be surprising -- and proclaimed herself to be an " Obama fan ". More recently, however, she made the following Tweet : Some anti-imperialist critics say that she's a Muslim Brotherhood-controlled opposition or spokesperson, which would not be too farfetched. Here, she is perpetuating the lies used to justify the United States' dirty war on Syria; namely, that the foreign-shipped, head-chopping "mo...

March 24th, 2019 will mark the 20th anniversary of 78-day NATO air-bombing of Yugoslavia, with Serbia suffering the most catastrophic damage since it was the central target. As was already mentioned , Serbia was at the centre of one of the most vicious U.S. imperialist propaganda campaigns; to add insult to injury, it was re-victimized and humiliated in the ICC. There are also reasonable grounds to believe that former Yugoslavian President and Serbian-born Slobodan Milošević was murdered (via poisoning) in 2006. Milošević was unfairly indicted for alleged war crimes and was arrested on March 31st, 2001. He was put on trial in the Hague Tribunal in 2002 and spent four years in prison, until the day of his death on March 11th, 2006. One of his defense lawyers, Christopher Black, writes  [1]: "The death of Slobodan Milosevic was clearly the only way out of the dilemma the NATO powers had put themselves in by charging him before the Hague tribunal. The propaganda against him...

"Let us take the profit, the private economic profit, out of medicine, and purify our profession of rapacious individualism... Let us say to the people not 'How much have you got?' but 'How best can we serve you?'"  — Norman Bethune Doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel thrive better in public universal health care systems because they are not strapped for time, and because they don't inherently want to operate by doing what's simplest for them, by taking shortcuts, and by constantly living in fear of facing lawsuits. Where are they pushed into operating in such a way that is anti-human and goes against ethics in medicine? In privatized health care systems, bastions of Neoliberalism, if ever, such as those seen in the United States. Profit-driven health care does not come with the right to privacy, dignity, and reasonable bodily autonomy, always lacking sufficient funding in providing a variety of options for patients. In public unive...