Eric Walberg

This was another superpower stand off, with the Soviets backing Vietnam, and US-China backing the genocidal Pol Pot. I remember this episode well, as ‘the collective west’ was backing Maoist China’s genocidal ally against newly liberated Vietnam, which was still reeling from four decades of imperialist wars and occupation.

The Union under Lincoln was initially spurned by Britain and France. Schadenfreude for the British and Napoleonic fantasies for the French. The British aristocracy was pro-south but the empire’s merchant rulers wisely didn’t take sides openly.

Civilization is built on deception, lies, violence, rooted in the great simian inversion: sex for pleasure, not pleasure for sex. For the wolf, sex is mostly for the alpha male once a year. Most wolf males are celibate. For humans, sex is a narcotic, a drug. Celibates are losers. Most humans can control their alcohol consumption (if not, it's either death or total degradation that follows), but not sex.

Islam arguably produced some of the greatest humour in world literature. What would we do without the 8th+ century 1001 Nights, 13th century Nasreddin?
So how do Muslim humorists adapt to modern secularism? There has been an explosion of Arab and south Asian stand-up comics in the past two decades, coinciding with 9/11.

A bicycle, not much more complicated (or dangerous) than walking, is close enough to a medieval pilgrimage, something that Dante, Chaucer and Shakespeare would all have embraced. I can see Shakespeare tooting past on his bike, off to the theatre or a picnic in the countryside.

To clarify the complexity of imperialist strategies from the twentieth century onwards, I defined three ‘games’ in Postmodern Imperialism: Geopolitics and the Great Games (2011). During the nineteenth century imperial game—what I call Great Game I (GGI)—Britain kept Afghanistan, Iran and the Ottoman Caliphate as nominally independent political formations, though in compliance with British interests. Great Game II was the stand-off with Soviet Union, Great Game III the post-soviet shifting order.

So Zionism began with the idea of bringing semitic peoples together, meaning Hebrew and Arabic speakers.* Could this be done peacefully? That was the original wish of at least Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, and Ben Gurion, and remains the professed intent of all but the extreme who want to annihilate/ deport all Arabs.

Although the writing style, seeing everything through conspiratorial eyes, with Russia always the bad guy, is irksome, there are interesting themes and juicy gossip:
*Under Andropov, the KGB was already working with the black market in anticipation of loosening control, and allowing some market (the 'luch' (light) program). Of course, the KGB wanted to keep control of cash flows. If that indeed was Andropov's plan, was it bad, as Belton implies? It sure beats letting a handful of men steal the nation's wealth and spirit it abroad, as Yeltsin did in the 1990s.

This diplomatic feint is not like earlier, truly historic deals with Israel---1979 for Egypt and 1993 for Jordan. The deal with Egypt, pushed by a US president truly committed to peace, Carter, forced Israel to give up the Sinai. The Zionists were not happy.

Asian Britons are all the direct product of the British empire, which steamrolled around the world, razing whatever got in its way, leaving a lot of detritus, creating new identities (for better or worse) for hundreds of millions, with a legacy that keeps giving today (for better or worse). As a Muslim Canadian, I enjoyed Sardar’s dissection of the British Muslim experience, which has some parallels with US-Canada, but a big difference.

... Thus, the 'virus' took hold again in 1945, a ‘second wave’. Like corona, capitalism mutates to meet any challenge. Faced with Hitler, it mutated into state socialism. Faced with a world in 1945 eager for real socialism, it mutated into the poisonous witchhunts of the 1950s.

Let's be clear: the EU was not set up to promote a friendly big socialist community, a Soviet-lite. The European Coal and Steel Community was set up in 1950 with the intent of promoting European integration, approved by Truman as a Cold War anti-domino measure.

Oh, for those peaceful 1990s! Saddam is already a footnote and al-qaeda and the Taliban have been eclipsed in the muslim world by the Islamic State, which miraculously expanded over the Levant, and is still hanging on there by a thread. Kept that way by US-Israel.

You can’t help but love all his characters (okay, a couple murderers excepted). And be overwhelmed by the feeling of a huge (too huge) nation wildly careering into a dystopic future, full of half-digested bits of flotsam washed up on the shores of what was once the world’s last pristine continent, and is now … Read it and laugh and cry.

Russia is playing a mediating, balancing role, as opposed to the US, Israel and Turkey, all pursuing their own warlike agendas. It looks now as if the Assad regime will survive and Syria will be able to rebuild (China is ready and willing), despite Turkey, Israel and the US. The next step is bringing some semblance of peace to Palestine. Why not a Putin- Netanyahu- Abbas ‘deal of the century’?

Anderson's Axis of Resistance takes on the leftist position of 'a plague on all your houses'. Yassin Al-Haj Saleh, ‘the intellectual voice of the Syrian revolution’ (for westerners), presents a bleak portrait of “three monsters … treading on Syria’s corpse’: (1) the Assad regime and its allies, (2) DAESH/ISIS and the other jihadists, and (3) the West (the USA, UK, France, etc). This is the general view from outside the Syrian cauldron, but leads nowhere.

The US blames the Iraq police and army for not preventing the demonstrators from entering the Green Zone, as if it is US territory. The image of survivors of the bombings bearing coffins of some of the 25 martyrs with them shows a different story. US actions only unite the Iraqis in opposition to them.

Timeline 2010-2019: United States&Canada
2010 *Republicans retake House of Representatives as Democrats lose 63 seats.
*US starts to bomb Yemen.
*Deepwater Horizon oil rig in Gulf of Mexico explodes, spilling millions of gallons of oil into sea. Worst oil spill in American history.
*US Representative Gabrielle Giffords severely wounded in assassination attempt when gunman went on shooting spree, killing federal judge John Roll and five others. Over the decade, mass shooting attempts became an almost weekly event. The group Everytown for Gun Safety identified 110 mass shootings, defined as shootings in which at least four people were murdered with a firearm, between 2009 and 2014.
...

2010 *Hamas, elected the governing authority of the Gaza Strip in 2007, remains in power, the Palestinian Authority refusing to hold (and lose) elections. Gaza now an open-air prison, cut off with only Israel allowing legal contact with the outside world. Gazans produce arms from smuggled supplies and build homemade rockets.
*BDS campaign targeting Israel picks up steam as Israel panics, raiding and seizing six ships of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea, killing 9 Turkish activists. Turkey breaks relations with Israel.
*Malicious computer worm, courtesy of US-Israel, damages Iran's nuclear program.
*Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev flees Bishkek

Those of us lucky/unlucky enough to live in the West see the rest of the world revolving around us, like Europe's 17th century sun, which, of course, orbited around the earth. So goes the western narrative: pre-Greece, Greece/Rome, Christianity, renaissance/ reformation, enlightenment, industrial revolution, nation-states/empire, WWI&II, cold war, democratic capitalism, end-of-history.
But Galileo tried a counterfactual: what would things look like, if I were standing on that blazing sun? Well, the rest-is-history. Maybe we aren’t the centre of the world. What if I were born and learned history as a Muslim?

Grossman swam the Danube one night and after wandering for hours, finally found an Austrian guard and asked to see the Soviet commandant. He joked with the Russian guard about Pushkin and Doestoevsky, the only Russian words he knew. He was accepted and sent to Bautzen, a hill-top town in eastern Saxony on the river Spree, complete with castle and magnificent Lutheran-Catholic cathedral.

Though #1 on the New York Times Bestseller list for 13 weeks in 1952, despite being hailed as "one of the dozen or so indispensable books of the century" (George Will), Witness quickly disappeared from our collective consciousness. We remember its most famous victim, Alger Hiss, as a nice guy who was mercilessly hounded, the prelude to the McCarthy purges of the 1950s, a gruesome stain on US history.

Today's standoff between the Russian bear and the American eagle is yet another epic struggle in Russia's history, at the heart of Eurasia--the world's "heartland". It had a narrow brush with complete collapse in 1985--98 under Gorbachev/ Yeltsin, a weak, indecisive leadership, a metaphorical reenactment of Boris Godunov seizing the throne in the 16th century. 1985--98 was a repetition of Godunov and the legendary Time of Troubles.

Of course, it is the top, the 1%, who shape us and any technological advances which are deemed profitable, and thus incorporated into the economy. And interactions in the economy are in the first place top-down, until, that is, there is some kind of revolution which empowers the bottom.
Bottom-up is democratic and should be our model. Are we living through such a revolution?

How do you explain the fact that the John Birch Society used 1984 as its main office telephone number in the 1960s? Or that both Animal Farm and 1984, are force-fed to virtually the entire western world in people’s formative years in their teens, even as Big Brother jacks up repression and surveillance, and pursues ever more cruel and senseless wars?
A look at Orwell’s weaknesses reveals how Big Brother turn the tables on him, getting the last laugh.

Orwell and Koestler's classics, Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949) vs Darkness at Noon (1940), all of them written in the heat of WWII, couldn't be more different. Orwell's colourful, if gloomy, social parables, were both successfully adapted more than once for the screen. Darkness at Noon never attracted any film offers. However, it is the first notable work equating Hitler and Stalin as totalitarian dictators

Blumenthal’s message is crystal clear: US-Israel policy from 1979 on has been to create and support Muslim terrorism, even as it claims to be fight terrorism. It used them in Afghanistan to undermine the Soviet Union, and has used them ever since to secure control of world politics. Create the problem, and provide the solution.

Gay is everywhere. Canada's new loonie celebrates 50 years of official gaydom. All the celebratory marches ignore the stark truth that the height of gaylib was long ago, 1978. The next 40 years has been a slow motion hangover, the homosexualization of America. Who better to turn to for assessing the state of the union than Edmund White, author of The Joy of Gay Sex (1977)?

The MB, like Iran's Islamic order, doesn’t fit into western secular thinking. The Muslim Brotherhood supported the mujahideen in Afghanistan. But they are not the Taliban, they never supported al-Qaeda. They are more in line with Turkey’s Islamists. Or Iran's Islamists.

So what accounts for the US hysteria? Could it have anything to do with the US deep state? Trump's hopes to deal honestly with Russia to solve the world's problems? His vow to bring the troops home from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria? For Americans tired of warmongering, arguably the real reason for Trump's astounding victory in 2016?

As Afghanistan enters its last dreadful lap, much like Vietnam circa 1970, I have been looking back to what fiction from those 'golden days' had to say, when students were alive with antiwar politics and sexual revolution, the empire at its peak of power and savagery. The parallels are bleak, and very, very enlightening.

We left off our saga of Justin and the Beanstalk with the young wunderkind's triumph over the giant ogre (Prime Minister Harper), as he swept away the broken democratic shards littering his kingdom in the sky, to the cries of joy from the Canadian peasants.

Fernandez's second book could be called The imperial messenger: Thomas Friedman at work Part II, or This is Not a Travel Book. The subject of her first book delightfully keeps popping up at conferences, interviewing American puppets, his spirit haunting her from the New York Times opeds exhorting Africans to tend their gardens, saluting Colombian ex-president Uribe.

It took four invasion attempts before Hassan's Dervish state was defeated, and Somali territories turned into a British 'protectorate'.
Afghanistan waged three wars against British imperialism in the 19th century.
Despite their similar beginnings and very different trajectories, both countries ended up as failed states, still being droned and bombed by the US in the pursuit of empire.

Bergdahl's desertion (he eventually ignored his defence lawyer and pleaded guilty) set in motion a domino effect on a massive scale, but not the one the prosecution tried to pin on him: that B’s desertion led to soldiers’ deaths. The early angry accusations soon melted under examination, leaving B’s actions as a butterfly effect in a chaotic world.

Plotz starts out believing vaguely in the existence of God, but not observing the rituals. During his reading, he comes to admire the rituals, and starts observing shabat.
But he’s not at all happy with the God the OT reveals. “I leave the bible as a hopeless and angry agnostic. God made me rational so i must use the tools to think about him. Submit him to rational and moral inquiry. And he fails that examination. The history of Judaism an effort to grapple with the bible’s horror.

I have been asked to address the role of the great powers and regional actors in post-occupation Afghanistan. Indulge me for a few moments to address the question in light of the current campaign by the only ‘great power’ against a country that looks surprisingly like Afghanistan, at least from a geopolitical and economic perspective -- Venezuela.

Kovalik doesn’t pretend to document all the US crimes (read William Blum for that). Rather, in ‘The Plot’ he takes you on a world tour to Eurasia, Africa and the Americas for key election rigging moments, moments that he connects with viscerally, and brings to life.

Afghanistan was supposed to be simple. Poof! The Taliban just disappeared and the US set up shop. But then the Taliban resurged. The strategy to hold on was Vietnam-style counterinsurgency, but that didn’t work then or now.
What to do? There is only one way out now for Trump. Do a Nixon: negotiate, declare victory, and leave.