To Protect Itself From U.S. Hostility Australia Decides to Buy U.S. Submarines

> Australia is not aligned with the US to protect itself from China. Australia is aligned with the US to protect itself from the US.

Joe Biden may have forgotten the name of the Australian Prime Minister. But Scott Morrison knows who he is expected to work for. In 1975 the U.S. and the UK launched a coup against the Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam who was moving his country towards independence. Few in the U.S. will remember that but Australian politicians do. Their country has since always done as it was told to do.

Continue reading at moonofalabama.org.

Welcome To Hegemonic Decline -- It Ain't Pretty

Maybe this isn’t the Afghanistan-related content that my largely-American audience is most eager to consume, but having been in London for the past two weeks and followed the coverage of the Afghanistan withdrawal here, I can’t help but be grimly fascinated by the steady stream of overwrought fury bellowing from UK political and media elites. It’s worth paying attention to as an American, even if you don’t have any particular reason to care about what goes on in the UK. Because what’s most grimly fascinating is that a furor which has dominated UK political debate for weeks arose not due to any decision taken by UK policy-makers, but rather due to a unilateral policy decision taken by Joe Biden. And yet, debate in the UK proceeds with hardly any acknowledgement of the willfully subservient military arrangement its elected officials have acceded to for decades. Instead, UK politicians and pundits lash out at Biden like he’s their own de facto chief executive or something; few seem aware of how fundamentally strange this is….

For a variety of reasons – including residual fantasies of Post-WWII glory, the exigencies of short-term party politics, among others – UK elected officials and pundits have studiously avoided any frontal acknowledgement of this submissive arrangement, and what it signifies about the limits of their own agency….

Why take any interest in this, as an American who otherwise ignores or is apathetic toward the UK? Perhaps because the shambolic uproar here is a preview of what’s to come “on this side of the Atlantic” (an annoyingly ubiquitous cliche). As US hegemony inevitably and ineluctably recedes, just like UK hegemony did in an earlier era, our own elites are unlikely to fare any better in the process of reconciling themselves to their newfound impotence.

Continue reading at mtracey.substack.com.

The Other Afghan Women

> In the countryside, the endless killing of civilians turned women against the occupiers who claimed to be helping them.

Entire branches of Shakira’s family tree, from the uncles who used to tell her stories to the cousins who played with her in the caves, vanished. In all, she lost sixteen family members. I wondered if it was the same for other families in Pan Killay. I sampled a dozen households at random in the village, and made similar inquiries in other villages, to insure that Pan Killay was no outlier. For each family, I documented the names of the dead, cross-checking cases with death certificates and eyewitness testimony. On average, I found, each family lost ten to twelve civilians in what locals call the American War.

Continue reading at newyorker.com.

Afghanistan Withdrawal Reveals Beltway Media's Loyalty to Permanent War State

> Biden's popular and long overdue withdrawal from Afghanistan triggered a big media meltdown that exposed its de facto merger with the military.

The patent falsehoods peddled by the Beltway press corps in response to the Biden withdrawal reveals just how tightly they have become linked to the interests of the military and Pentagon. And its flamboyant opposition to a pull-out favored a solid majority of the American public is yet another factor that will accelerate the decline of an already cratering corporate media.

Continue reading at thegrayzone.com.

Thousands of Syrians Protest Against US Occupation Forces in Deir Ezzor

> Protesters demand the release of hundreds of anti-terror fighters who were unlawfully arrested by US troops and the SDF.

Thousands of Syrians staged a protest against US occupation forces in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor to condemn the arrest of 300 anti-terrorist fighters from the Al-Shaitat tribe.

According to reports, demonstrators called for the immediate release of the tribesmen who have been instrumental in the fight against the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group, and who were allegedly imprisoned without charges. For their part, the US and the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) maintain the tribesmen were arrested for “collaborating” with the Syrian government.

Protesters also said that if the prisoners are not released, the protest would spread…

Continue reading at thecradle.co.

How the CIA Used ISIS-K to Keep Its Afghanistan Business

> There is a larger story behind the recent terror events in Afghanistan. Here is an attempt to track it down.

If ISKP is, as shown [in the linked article], a CIA/NDS product and if the guards at the airport who killed the ‘most victims’ in the attack are CIA led Afghan special forces why did all this happen?

Continue reading at moonofalabama.org.

How (and Why) Israel Changed What "Fully Vaccinated" Means

> Newspeak definition opens the door for more authoritarian control, huge Big Pharma profits... and potentially the worst deception of the entire "pandemic".

In Israel, officially, those who have been injected with two doses of Pfizer’s so-called vaccine are no longer counted as vaccinated.

What does this mean?

Continue reading at off-guardian.org.

Why Do We Question Motives?

I don’t know if we’re in the heyday of questioning the motives of people we disagree with rather than simply rebutting them – character assassination, that is – but it’s got me wondering why this is such a popular pastime these days. Think about how often we hear people’s motives impugned – even when they have impressive credentials – because of their positions on COVID-19, climate change, nutrition, racial policy – you name it. Considering motivation is not a bad thing per se, but too often it substitutes for a counterargument. That’s a confession of vacuity….

If someone defends a proposition that is easily refuted or has been repeatedly refuted before, we might wonder why that person defended it. Inquiring into the possible motives seems appropriate, but not before the claim is shown to be poor.

Continue reading at libertarianinstitute.org.

The Covidian Cult (Part III)

In order to oppose this new form of totalitarianism, we need to understand how it both resembles and differs from earlier totalitarian systems. The similarities are fairly obvious – the suspension of constitutional rights, governments ruling by decree, official propaganda, public loyalty rituals, the outlawing of political opposition, censorship, social segregation, goon squads terrorizing the public, and so on – but the differences are not obvious.

Whereas 20th-Century totalitarianism (i.e., the form most people are generally familiar with) was more or less national and overtly political, New Normal totalitarianism is supranational, and its ideology is much more subtle. The New Normal is not Nazism or Stalinism. It is global-capitalist totalitarianism, and global capitalism doesn’t have an ideology, technically, or, rather, its ideology is “reality.” When you are an unrivaled global ideological hegemon, as global capitalism has been for the last 30 years or so, your ideology automatically becomes “reality,” because there are no competing ideologies. Actually, there is no ideology at all … there is only “reality” and “unreality,” “normality” and “deviations from the norm.”…

A globally hegemonic system has no need for ideology, because it doesn’t have to compete with rival ideologies. So it erases ideology and replaces it with “reality.” Reality (whatever you personally believe it is, which of course is what it really is) is not actually erased. It just doesn’t matter, because you do not get to dictate “reality.”…

Also, because this “reality” is not a cohesive ideological system with fundamental values, core principles, and so on, it can be drastically revised or completely replaced more or less at a moment’s notice. Global capitalism has no fundamental values – other than exchange value, of course – and thus it is free to manufacture any kind of “reality” it wants, and replace one “reality” with a new “reality” any time that serves its purposes, like stagehands changing a theatrical set.

For example, the “Global War on Terror,” which was the official “reality” from 2001 until it was canceled in the Summer of 2016, when the “War on Populism” was officially launched. Or, now, the “New Normal,” which replaced the “War on Populism” in the Spring of 2020. Each of which new simulations of “reality” was rolled out abruptly, clumsily even, like that scene in 1984 where the Party switches official enemies right in the middle of a Hate Week speech.

Continue reading at consentfactory.org.