Geopolitical Outlook

The first round of U.S.-British airstrikes on Baghdad on March 3, 2003, marking the beginning of the 2003 U.S. war on Iraq. How soon will we start hearing the likes of Extinction Rebellion, and other neo-Malthusianists, echoing the infamous words of former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who said that the 500,000 Iraqi children killed by U.S. sanctions was "worth it"? It's only a matter of time that they will, and we should not put it past them to do so. Just a few months leading up to the U.S.-backed right-wing coup in Bolivia, they were already making calls to oust Evo Morales and were, amongst all things, blaming him for the Amazon forest fires (even though he was actively helping to put them out) and using them as a pretext for imperialist intervention. According to modern-day, vacuous, and 'woke' eco-Malthusianists, independent sovereign nations (i.e. Cuba, Syria, the DPRK, and Nicaragua), who dare to defy the global dictatorship of the U...

The poisonous ideology of neo-Malthusianism, which has seen a resurgence, continues to plague and seep into almost every Western channel imaginable, further alienating and dividing the masses. The Global South is especially disproportionately blamed for climate change, with accusations of "overpopulation" and "breeding like rabbits". The notion that the world needs to be drastically depopulated and that "humans are a cancerous tumor eating up the world's resources," would have the poor believe that they are responsible for their own misery -- and not the capitalist-imperialists who make a profit from stealing wealth and resources, and who are the real culprits behind the environmental destruction.  Below is an excerpt from Capital Vol. I , Chapter 25 by Karl Marx. Specifically, it is the portion on the Great Famine of Ireland and how the drastic decrease in the Irish population made the poor and working classes suffer even more, while the ruling c...

What neo-Malthusianists fail to realize is that poverty, unemployment, and the lack of equal distribution of resources has nothing to do with the world having "too many people". Then again, when one has an extremely pessimistic, anti-human, millenarianist worldview, one cannot rationalize any of the material conditions scientifically. Although the world has changed since the 1800's, a long standing feature of capitalism still remains, in spite of Marx and Engels not foreseeing the advent of artificial intelligence (A.I.): the capitalist bias of technology and overproduction. Firstly, technological advances are not necessarily or inherently 'bad' especially if they help workers be more productive and help make their work and lives easier; they do indeed have the potential to serve human needs. However, capitalist 'efficiency' has never been about raising output or productivity; investment under capitalism always meant replacing workers with machines an...

Sabaa Bahrat Square in Damascus, Syria. The following below is an addendum to and expansion of the second paragraph of the previous blog entry, " Geopolitical Context Matters pt. 2 - Slouching Towards Syria ". Generally speaking, the West -- but especially America -- is a bastion of ignorance when it comes to the Arab and Muslim world, with two extremes: the right-wing who see Islam as a race (rather than a religion) and a civilizational threat and equate all Muslims with Osama bin Laden. While the liberals and the 'left' also see Islam as a race and think that Wahhabism is just a mere expression of victimhood. Contrary to a popular narrative that is uncritically accepted by Western liberals and leftists, Wahhabism is not an expression of victimhood. Sunni Muslims are also not inherently or naturally predisposed to such an ideology. While racism, xenophobia, and anti-immigrant sentiment is rife with far-right circles who take a racially-charged approach and t...

Illustration by political commentator and cartoonist, Bill Purkasthaya. Original image found here . Geopolitically-illiterate radlibs in the West still seem to be under the delusion that the Kurdish YPG and PKK -- nothing more than just another set of U.S.-backed terrorist proxy forces -- are the "most oppressed-est", matriarchal-pantheist, utopic peoples like the blue Na'vi people, which are fictional sentient extraterrestrial humanoids found in the film Avatar . Supposed Kurdish "victimhood" is quite the fashionable trend in many Western "progressive" circles these days (despite it being wholly ahistorical and largely exaggerated or outright fictitious), so much so that they are angry at the thought of U.S. troops pulling out of Syria and ending support for the Kurdish Contras even though it should be seen as a positive. The Syrian Arab Republic are the real effective fighting force against ISIS, not the Kurds (an imperialist propaganda constr...

The Joker movie is not an incel movie or an "angry straight white male" movie. It's a film about class consciousness and alienation under capitalism, especially late stage capitalism. The fact that it is receiving a lot of backlash from Forbes (and other elite publications like it), "alt"-rightists, and 'social justice warriors' (sjw's) alike makes it all the more intriguing. It most definitely is not the "Hollywoke"-kind of film that is, figuratively speaking, force-fed to the masses. Examples of "Hollywoke" films include those found in the Disney-owned Marvel Cinematic Universe, the post-Lucas Star Wars films (also Disney-owned, and sans George Lucas' input), and the 2016 Ghostbusters movie. It also most certainly is not an appeal to white nationalists and/or hardline reactionaries. And so here we have a refreshing cinematic piece of art. Watch Jason Unruhe's review of the film in the video above. (Warning: the re...

Pictured left to right: Hafez al Assad, Muammar Gaddafi, and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat. Several years before his death on June 10, 2000, the late Syrian Arab Republic President Hafez al Assad (father of Bashar al Assad) lamented bitterly that, "When France entered our countries they were united [as one: Syria]. When it left they were disunited [partitioned into four separate countries.]" Prior to Syria liberating itself from French colonialism, with the Ba'ath Arab Socialist Party taking power, and establishing the independent Syrian Arab Republic, the French (and the British) had divided the formerly single, united nation into four separate countries, effectively redrawing the world map in the years between 1918-1923. These four countries were: mainland Syria, Palestine, Jordan, and Lebanon. In fact, Palestine used to be Syria's southern third province and was actually called Southern Syria. As for Jordan: the British created it as a kingdom for the Hashemite...