In an effort to bring the behemoth capitalist giant, Amazon, to the bargaining table for a contract, seven Amazon facilities went on strike on Thursday, December 19th at 6 AM. Workers at DBK4 in New York City; DGT8 in Atlanta; DFX4, DAX5, DAX8 in Southern California; DCK6 in San Francisco and DIL7 in Skokie, Illinois initiated the strike. Teamster President Sean O’Brien addressed Amazon owner Jeff Bezos: “If your package is delayed during the holidays, you can blame Amazon’s insatiable greed. We gave Amazon a clear deadline to come to the table and do right by our members. They ignored it.” Bezos is worth $238 billion dollars. The average Amazon worker takes home under $30,000 per year. Amazon generated over $620 billion dollars in revenue for the twelve months ending September 30, 2024, a 11.93% increase from last year, yet they refuse to recognize the workers’ unionizing efforts. The workers erected a giant pig to symbolize Bezos and the billionaires' anti-worker greed.

If ever there was one, this is a David versus Goliath struggle. 

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A Sociological Snapshot of the New York City Proletariat

The workers are a snapshot of the proletariat of NYC. They are West Indian, Mexican, Dominican, Dominican American, Trinidadian, American etc. Many came here from one of the countries occupied by the United States, searching for a dream. What they found was more class struggle.

This is Sunnyside, where Queens blends into Brooklyn. The workers all have other jobs or side hustles. This is New York Motherfucking City. You survive or you don’t. Under capitalism, no one gives a fuck about you. The workers’ social media reflects this economic reality. Desmond sings calypso at clubs on the weekends. Others work security or drive Uber eats. Steve bounces at clubs on the side. Juan Luis is a Dominican hip hop artist. They invent ever more creative hustles to make ends meet. They need better salaries. They need insurance. They need sick days. They need workers’ comp. They need job security. As Pedro Pietri’s immortal poem “Puerto Rican Obituary” lays out: these workers have been fighting their whole lives and never got a break. They have family members to maintain here and others back in their home countries. Remittances are the lifeblood for their homelands, still in the grip of U.S. imperialism.

There are mothers and fathers on the picket line by day who bring their children and families. The children chant as enthusiastically as their fearless parents. The night crew has its own aesthetic. They pass the holiday coquito (rum-based eggnog) and spicy home-cooked food as the dembow (Dominican rap) and Bruce Springsteen blare out. Juan Carlos, Belinda and a crew crowd around small space heaters trading war stories from the inside of the Amazon facility which towers over us. They share music, chants and coffee. After sundown, Ramón passes out hot chocolate. Upon being released from jail, Tony, the most beloved of the Teamster organizers, starts dancing with a worker leader, Stacey. We chant: “Who are we? Teamsters!” and “What do we want? A union. When do we want it? Now!”

Only the NYC proletariat could maintain a certain level of Caribbean enthusiasm on a 20°F Queens night. Many daydream about being back home in 87°F lands with their families and fight the nostalgia, huddling closer to one another.

And here we were, on just another night in the N Y C, marching with working-class people of every skin complexion and accent, fighting to survive...

Survival until revolution...

On the Picket Line
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On the first day of the strike, the police carted off workers in handcuffs who attempted to engage the scabs. A Dominican worker yells that the monos azules (the blue monkeys, Dominican slang for pigs) are closing in. We attempted to prevent the arrests but the phalanx of jakes (Queen’s slang for the pigs) and paddy wagons. Gustavo starts a chant, echoed by hundreds: “Fuck Be-zos! Fuck Be-zos!”

At the DBK-4 Amazon delivery facility located in Maspeth, Queens, the strikebreakers drove by, protected by the police. Some cover their faces because they feel shame; others because no one ever taught them to believe in themselves or the working class. Some told us they understand the need for this strike but they have to send back money to El Salvador or Barbados for the holidays. This is realpolitik. Objective facts are dogged; identity politics are dogmatic. This is Queens, the borough of “Get Rich or Die Trying.” Some workers are looking to be the next Nicki Minaj or 50 Cent, far fewer the next Joe Hill or Mother Jones. In Marxist lingo, we call this False Consciousness. This is individualist and consumer heaven, an anti-worker paradise.

The workers’ breath is visible as they condemn the elevation of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and other oligarchs above us in this caste society. The fluorescent blue letters A M A Z O N light up the street. They blast dancehall reggae and a local DJ who moonlights as Amazon delivery driver pumps out music from every corner of the Americas. On Saturday, mysteriously there was a massive flood when giant hoses dumped an avalanche of streaming, freezing water on the sidewalk where workers were picketing.

Thousands of UPS drivers, teachers, and community members, including the American Communist Party, Infrared and Midwestern Marx, have come out across the country in support and stood on the picket lines. One NY state ACP member and labor organizer laid out the strategy: 

Buildup to the Strike

As both the bourgeois press and the Teamsters have emphasized, this is “the largest strike in Amazon’s history.”

The first recorded Amazon strike occurred in Minnesota in 2018 during Amazon’s Prime Day. The Awood Center, a nonprofit advocacy group in Minnesota for East African immigrants, organized the strike. Demands were for reduced workloads, better safety measures, higher wages, and improved job security, a running theme for the strikes that followed. The strike did not affect production because not enough workers participated out of fear and indifference. However, it did receive enormous attention from the bourgeois press, as it was the first significant protest at an Amazon site in the US.

Since then there have been small waves of protest, with Chris Smalls at the JFK-8 warehouse leading a strike in March 2020, due to the spread of COVID-19 at the warehouse. After this, due to the spread of information by social media and the bourgeois press, workers in several other locations, often with “the help” of nonprofits, launched small scale actions. The next major action was in April 2021, at the DIL3 Delivery Stations in Gage Park, Chicago. Delivery drivers walked out during the shift. This was followed in December 2021 by a walkout at the DIL3 and DLN2 delivery stations in Cicero, Illinois. The latter was the first multi-site walkout at Amazon and both were organized by Amazonians United. This was followed by the unionization of the JFK-8 facility in Staten Island, with the newly formed Amazon Labor Union(ALU) in April 2022.

We see a pattern here. There is hysteria from the bourgeois press with no major impact on output. Bernie Sanders and faux leftist politicians like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez gave it their full support, fawning over such victories. Liberals specialize in celebrating hollow, symbolic victories. Workers fight in the spirit of James Connolly: “For our demands most moderate are, We only want the earth...”

The ALU decided in June 2024 to affiliate with the Teamsters union. After internal struggle, the Amazon Labor Union split with Chris Smalls as leader and reorganized itself in late July 2024. With the partnership of the Teamsters and the ALU set, the Teamsters moved forward in their initiative to organize Amazon facilities. This introduced a large union with lots of organizers and funding into this struggle and led to the unionization of thousands of additional workers. Despite hundreds of thousands of Teamster dollars poured into this organizational effort, the results have been subpar to say the least. The true test of a union is its ability to organize the masses in collective action and thus far they have fallen short.

The hope of the organizers is that these actions will wake up the slumbering masses of Amazon workers into action and generate enough momentum to bring Amazon to the table. At a closing rally before a holiday break, the labor organizers informed workers of their Weingarten rights in case there is retaliation against them on the job. 

Late-Stage Capitalism: Its Challenges and Lessons

Marxist-Leninist Amilcar Cabral always said: “Tell no lies, Claim no easy victories...:

Output has barely been affected. In DBK4, where we were, most workers crossed the picket line, despite the incredible media attention that this effort had received from the bourgeois press. At midnight, Friday, December 21st, at the Staten Island facility where the Teamsters represent 5,500 workers, few workers came out to walk the picket line. There were significantly more leftists than workers, showing the disconnect at the heart of this struggle.
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This is a minority strike against a capitalist behemoth that is hidden behind layers of legal subterfuges and subcontracting tricks. Bezos even claims the delivery drivers are not “his workers,” but are rather employees of Cornucopia and other subcontractors. The billionaires can now hide behind subsidiaries to distance themselves from the exploitation of the hundreds of thousands of workers who enrich them.

The key problem with this strike and the organization of transient workers like Amazon and Starbucks workers, is that the lead organizers, the paid staff of the union, have yet to listen to the wisdom of the masses. They attempt to inject a fighting spirit into the working class and substitute themselves for labor. Temporary workers don’t want to work for Amazon for the rest of their lives, stuck in this boring, repetitive, backbreaking work. As even Forbes, a chief mouthpiece of the billionaires admits, a high percentage of all workplace injuries in the U.S. occur at Amazon. The turnover rate is an astonishing 150 percent per year. These are some of the reasons there is little loyalty to the profession.

The Teamsters are attempting to bring Bezos to the bargaining table but there is a lack of unity among the base of the movement, the 750,000 workers, who are easily replaced and constantly moving in and out of the job. Over the past three days, Bezos’ The Washington Post, has run at least six different articles covering the strike from the perspective of the shareholders. They continue to pop champagne as their stocks go up and their own media companies glorify a struggle doomed to fail. Labor analysts explain the logic of the ruling class. They prop up unwinnable struggles, complementary to their aims of the continued occupation of the American people and the peoples of the world.

The bourgeois press is the enemy’s weapon and is used to mislead and misdirect revolutionary forces. Twitter, or X, is enemy territory designed to sap our militant energies. We cannot rely on social media to discover our duties to the American worker. We must deepen our independent investigation, utilizing our own forces, and become the decisive factor that ensures that workers not only fight, but win.

It is incumbent on us as communists to determine the concrete realities and the balance of forces within each particular labor struggle that emerges. It is not enough to simply support the striking workers, but we must also consider why it is that the vast majority did not strike, without simply writing them off as “scabs and traitors.” We must continue to reach out to them and hear their voices.

The ACP is engaging in more thorough investigation of labor in our regions and nationally. We seek to understand: What is the character of the proletariat in our particular areas? What are the most critical industries and where are the workers the strongest? What are the struggles that the bourgeois press is hiding? Which struggles are most likely to win and which ones need the most support? Which struggles advance the overall interests of the American proletariat and push them closer to the seizure of power? How can we drive up the “sensuous” immersion and practical participation of all cadres, particularly the terminally-online? 

​The ACP sees social investigation and active community involvement as absolutely essential to answer these questions and as the most honest measurement of who the emerging leaders are.

“I Got Your Back!”

For all the naysayers, who say the Bezos, Musks, Clintons and Trumps are
untouchable, we proletarians do not feel defeated.

24 hours before the most sacred of family holidays, workers stood their ground. These five days in December have taught us a great deal about the American proletariat, ourselves and our relationship to the working class. Over and over, those of us in the heat of class struggle, heard how much the Amazon workers had grown as friends, sisters and brothers and most importantly as comrades. A worker leader removed his Teamster Amazon skully to pledge his support for anyone who needed help moving forward. In this simple gesture, he was injecting optimism where the billionaires insisted on division, sectarianism and pessimism. Dozens of delivery men and women remarked how they had never spent so much time with their coworkers. Huddled around space heaters, they promised to have one another's backs moving forward, determined to bring more of their coworkers onto the picket lines. Teamster organizer Tony closed a final rally before Christmas Eve exclaiming: “This is just the beginning. None of us as individuals are heroes. Together we are all heroes. We are the spark. We will inspire tens of thousands of others to strike!” 

​ FREEDOM AND AUTHORITY: WHY SYRIA IS NOT FREE.
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We have witnessed scores of celebrations in the streets of Syria's major cities, and across social media in the aftermath of the collapse of Syria's state. Such scenes are reminiscent of the original 'Arab spring' in 2011.

People have evidently since not learned the lessons of why liberalism is fundamentally incapable of achieving freedom for a people.

Of course, in the aftermath of the collapse of a state there is a great deal of catharsis, joy and reprieve that is felt.

States are definitely imperfect and full of flaws. When they collapse, all of the injustices, flaws, and imperfections of a state immediately feel like they have disappeared.

And they have in a sense: The key word is immediately. The pressure and fear felt by a state authority disappears. It's defects all suddenly disappear. All of its injustices appear to have been avenged immediately.

That is because what is still taken for granted are the necessities provided by the state - security, stability, and most importantly, centralized authority capable of operating at the scale of an entire country.

In the short and immediate term, these do not disappear right away. People acquire the illusion that only all the bad has disappeared - it takes a few weeks for them to realize that the good has been thrown out too.

In the case of today's Syria, this is days. Not days after this 'revolution,' Israel has invaded and destroyed all of Syria's military infrastructure.

Arab Spring style 'revolutions' feel very nice in the short term. The whole country can even feel united to an extent, as a modern state principally unites a country by, at minimum, inflicting upon it the trauma of indiscriminately enforcing universal submission to its authority.

But the number one problem with the liberal comprehension of what a state is, is that it is personalized. Everyone blames Bashar for every grievance. Everyone wants to give the state a face, and treat it like the slights committed against them individually are personal.

The brutal truth is that the state is not personal. It is an organ whose subject is an impersonal and collective reality that encompasses a scale that is simply beyond the comprehension of ordinary individual experience. It is no different than a force of nature.

States appear brutal and inhuman because they do not react to individuals, but masses. At the scale of tens of millions, encompassing geographies and territories that are too big for one person to possibly experience.

Think about how cold and inhuman surgeons can often appear. They cannot be emotional and personal when operating on someone - they are dealing with the impersonal reality of physiology, that is blind to our personal sentiments and subjectivities.

And none the less we need our organs to survive and be personal in the first place.

The same is true for states - a central authority that is blind to the individual, capable of enforcing the unity of a territory and its economic intercourse (via taxation, public works, etc.), capable of defending the people from foreign armies with a standing army, is a precondition for the possibility of a peoples free development.

Modern states are necessary for a given population to resist colonial slavery, debt and pauperization on a mass scale by unifying a country’s productive forces and supply chains.

Building modern infrastructure, investing domestically in industry, and ensuring access to electricity, water, and internet even for remote villages is only possible with a modern central authority.

The brutality of modern states like Syria's appear senselessly cruel. But such a cruel authority is what it takes to unite a people beyond tribal, sectarian, and ethnic differences.

To govern at the helm of a modern state is to occupy a very wide and long term perspective. This appears inhumane to people who cannot see beyond the scale of their personal and individual experiences.

To effectively govern at the helm of the modern state machinery requires making difficult choices that benefit your population in the long term, at the expense of the pain and suffering of some in the short term.

All of Syria's minorities had grievances with Assad. It just seems like Sunni Arabs hated him the most because they're in the majority. Only because of that did Syrias other minorities see him as the lesser of two evils - to oppose the majority.

All of Syria’s minorities resented the central state authority. They just resented each other more.
The truth is, the regime was keeping all these feuding sects at bay from destroying the entire unity of the nation. All of them were trying to assert their private and sectarian interests at the expense of national unity.

The truth is, all of the Syrian people had the same primitive, petty and backward tribalism that made them resent the modern state. The Ba’athist regime represented a step in advance toward elevating them to modern civilization.

Of course, the fact that it has collapsed has proven that it was full of inadequacies, corruption, defects and incompetence. Yet that doesn’t justify celebrating everything being thrown away.

In my opinion, part of the reason the Ba’athist regimes fell to feuding sectarianism (notwithstanding the obvious fact of foreign imperialist intervention) is that they did not fully disempower the landowning and bourgeois elites. These elites were the source of sectarianism - they acted as mafia bosses for their tribes and sects.

They should have been smashed. That is true socialist democracy. Say what you want about Enver Hoxha’s Albania, but sectarianism was the least of Albania’s issues. He smashed all the feudal, tribal and bourgeois authorities completely. That’s why Albanian Muslims and Christians don’t kill each other today.

Ironically, the problem with Bashar was not that he was a brutal tyrant, but that HE WAS NOT BRUTAL AND AUTHORITARIAN ENOUGH.

Recently, @yanisvaroufakis  wrote that anti-imperialists shouldn’t defend ‘tyrants,’ because tyrants are not competent anti-imperialists. In the case of Syria this appears like a compelling argument.

But the problem with Syria wasn’t that it was a ‘tyranny.’ Plenty of ‘tyrannies’ (from the liberal perspective) are immensely popular. Look no further than China, North Korea and today’s Russia.

The problem is not tyranny but incompetence. Liberal ‘democracy’ means the destruction of all sovereign state infrastructure in non-Western countries. I mean, democracy itself is a pure myth even in the West - it’s just that only the West can afford this expensive and wasteful pageantry to dupe its own citizens.

Everyone else, in order to be sovereign, has to contend themselves with the necessity of first of all building functioning modern states. And there is no time or energy for the silly mythology of liberal democracy. What comes first is establishing central authority, modern infrastructure, national industrial policy, and modern defense.

True ‘democracy’ is not hamstringing the decisive tasks of a state authority by putting everything to a vote. Only states whose popularity and democratic legitimacy are insecure have to do that. True ‘democracy’ is governing on behalf of the will of the broad majority of ordinary and common people.

Sometimes that will has to be measured through elections, referendums and votes. But that is not the popular FOUNDATION of the state, that is just another mechanism of the modern state.

The true popular foundation of the modern state, well, even the ancient states of Babylonia, lies in people acquiring an economic stake in the system, and a common existence through war.

The ‘people’ only become a subject when individuals are dying and risking everything for it. What determines the popular will is not elections - but war and struggle.

What makes ‘the people’ an authority is not when a populations’ votes are tallied up, but when they become something on behalf of which armies can be raised, mobilized, and materially sustained (by populations, being fed and quartered, etc.).

The foundation of popular sovereignty is not electoralism, but the ability for a state to facilitate and realize the social contract: An extent to which the impersonal reality of state power recognizes and is recognized by people.

It is true that anyone can falsely claim that their actions are being done in the name of the people. But for it to be proven, ‘the people’ actually have to materially tip the scales to your advantage over your enemies in war.

A true authority rises to power on the basis of recognition by the popular national subject (the people) - rather than tribes, oligarchies and cliques. This recognition is not proven by elections - but by war, and by its ability to respond to their existence, and by the ability for that response to somehow itself be communicated to individuals.

The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Communists did not need elections to prove their popularity. The fact that nearly all the Russian peasantry went over to their side from the strategic standpoint of a civil war, proved it in actual material reality rather than institutionally.

Without the Arab street, the fellaheen and the popular masses, there would never have been Ba’athist states nor Nasserism. Somehow, this fact got lost on all the discourse surrounding the ‘Arab spring’ in 2011. The liberal view was taken for granted over the socialist view regarding democracy and popular legitimation.

Obviously in their later years, Arab nationalist regimes like Bashar’s were deeply unpopular and so were other nationalist leaders. But is that because they were tyrants, or because they were weak? Think about it.

Was Hosni Mubarak a strong man? What was so strong about him? Who was stronger, Nasser or Anwar Sadat? Now ask - who was more popular? Who was more popular, Bashar or his father?

Arab nationalist modernism wasn’t perfect but that doesn’t mean it accomplished nothing. And while the Six Day war is remembered as having discredited the project, people forget just how close the then matured regimes got to defeating Israel in 73.

I believe Syrians, like today's Iraqis, will miss the cruelty of the regime most of all. They will see it for the impersonal and blind justice that it was, trying its best to keep everyone in line for the sake of the country's independence and sovereignty.

Ba'athism/Nasserism wasn't perfect. But it built military modernization, central state authority, modern infrastructure, and sovereign command economies.

Syrians should know if Syria is going to survive, it will have to build off the foundations that have been thus far developed.

Turkey will never accept Arabs as their brothers. Turkey has its own modern national state tradition in Kemalism.

I am far from saying it is impossible to achieve greater justice for the Syrian people than what existed before. Syrians are going to realize just how ‘Syrian’ they were - rather than how Sunni, Shia, Christian, Alawite, and Kurdish - when they face the reality that Turkey has no intention of integrating them as equals.

I am saying that liberal illusions must be cast aside and that a new, strong and tough state authority will still need to be built - it is a fundamental part of the infrastructure of modern civilizations.

Many Shias in Iraq today miss Saddams rule. And that is not because they personally forgive Saddam, it's because they understand that dismantling and destroying the sovereign state infrastructure of the Iraqi state was a huge mistake.

And that their grievances with Saddam did not justify that. The same is true for Syria.
The region as a whole must rediscover a form of regime politics far stronger than Ba'athism and Arab nationalism.

It is evidently the case that the Arab nationalist form of modernism was a failure. Its exclusion of Kurds and other ethnic minorities made it impossible. Such exclusions reinforced the very tribal parochialisms that the nationalists wanted to overcome.

However, ‘liberal democracy,’ and Jihadi-liberalism is a nonstarter. These lead only to the destruction of nations and peoples.

A form of regime politics evidently stronger than Ba’athism is called the proletarian dictatorship, and it is what prevented many parts of Asia from looking like the middle east today.

Communism is not just some pipedream or ideal. In practice, it addressed precisely the problems faced by countries like Syria today. The East has its own Red, democratic tradition. There is no need to look toward the rotten colonial West for a model of governance.
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That is my sincere advice to the people of Syria as Chairman of the American Communist Party.

The U.S. government is simultaneously (A) justifying Israel’s land grab in Syria by saying the nation has been taken over by terrorists, and (B) talking about removing those same forces from its list of designated terrorist organizations.

The people running the U.S. podium have pivoted seamlessly from celebrating the liberation of the Syrian people in the removal of President Bashar al-Assad to citing the fact that the nation is now overrun with terrorist factions in defense of Israel’s rapid move to militarily occupy large swathes of Syrian land while hammering Syria with hundreds of airstrikes.

At a Monday press conference, State Department Spokesman Matthew Miller said these moves by Israel “are temporary to defend its borders” and that Assad’s ouster “potentially creates a vacuum that could have been filled by terrorist organizations that would threaten the state of Israel and would threaten civilians inside Israel.”
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“Every country has the right to take action against terrorist organizations,” Miller added.

During a Tuesday press conference Miller further clarified the U.S. position on Israel’s land grab, saying,

​During the same Tuesday press conference Miller also stated that “there is no legal barrier to us speaking to a designated terrorist group” such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham or HTS, the group which led the run on Damascus whose leader has been an official in both ISIS and al-Qaeda.

And as it happens the U.S. government has now taken a sudden interest in removing HTS from its listing as a designated terrorist organization, with Politico reporting that there is now “a furious debate playing out in Washington” as to whether or not the group should be removed from the list immediately. Somehow I doubt the debate is actually all that “furious”.

So according to one narrative Syria has been liberated by brave freedom fighters and that’s wonderful, but according to another concurrent narrative Israel obviously needs to invade Syria because the nation has just been taken over by evil terrorists, and by yet another concurrent narrative those evil terrorists aren’t evil terrorists anymore because they’re going to be running a U.S. puppet regime.

These are the kinds of contradictions you run into when your policies are guided by the blind pursuit of planetary domination instead of by truth and morality.

In reality, “terrorist organization” is a political designation, not a behavioral one. It has a lot less to do with how an organization acts and operates and a lot more to do with whether or not they advance the strategic interests of the U.S. empire. 

Pick any group of non-state actors who fight against the U.S. and its allies and you’ll find them on the U.S. government’s list of terrorist organizations. Hamas. Hezbollah. They’ll even put official state militaries on there like Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. 

They used to list the East Turkistan Islamic Movement as a terrorist faction back when the U.S. was expanding its global military presence under the banner of the “war on terror,” but they were removed from this listing at the tail end of the Trump administration because the Uyghur Islamist group was fighting Assad in Syria and could prove useful in the empire’s Cold War aggressions against China.
Even now the U.S. House of Representatives is moving to ban the U.S. government from using the statistics of Gaza’s Health Ministry to calculate deaths from Israel’s genocidal atrocities in the enclave on the basis that the ministry is run by Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. They need to do this because the Gaza Health Ministry’s death toll is considered so reliable that the U.S. State Department has been using those stats in their own reports.

The group that is committing the genocide necessitating such analysis is of course not a designated terrorist organization.

This is because the label “terrorist organization” is nothing more than a tool of imperial narrative control. In empire language it just means “disobedient population who need bombs dropped on them.” If they are determined to no longer be disobedient then they no longer need bombs dropped on them, so they are no longer considered terrorists. 
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You can kill all the civilians you want using whatever methods you want without being considered a terrorist organization, so long as you are a friend of the U.S. empire.

This article is produced by Consortiumnews.

Kiev has maintained close ties with the former ISIS and Al-Qaeda militants currently in control of Syria since the start of the war with Russia in 2022

​The Ukrainian government provided fighters from the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) extremist armed group with “about 150 first-person-view drones” and at least 20 experienced drone operators in the lead-up to the flash offensive that ended with the fall of the Syrian Arab Republic.

According to sources who spoke with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, Kiev “sought to undermine Russia and its Syrian allies” by arming the UN-designated terrorist organization.

The drones were delivered “four to five weeks ago,” Ignatius reports.

As early as September, Turkish media reported on the presence of Ukrainian specialists in Syria training the former ISIS and Al-Qaeda militias in control of Idlib on the use of drones.

“A delegation from Ukraine went to Idlib in recent months and met with the leaders of the terrorist organization,” Turkish newspaper Aydinlik reported on 9 September, adding that the operatives from Kiev requested the release of several Chechen, Georgian, and Albanian militants held in HTS prisons in exchange for dozens of drones.

“HTS accepted the conditions … and some radical figures were released from their prisons,” Kurdish sources told Aydinlik.

Days later, Sputnik reported that 250 Ukrainian military experts arrived in Idlib to train the extremists in the use and manufacture of drones.

“The Ukrainian military is training militants affiliated with the Turkistan Islamic Party under the command of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham for the use of drones and technologies to develop them with regard to the ability to increase flight speeds, photography, and targeting,” the report highlighted.

“There is information that Ukrainian envoys, those of Ukrainian intelligence, are in the Idlib de-escalation zone on the territory of Syria, where they are recruiting militants of Jabhat al-Nusra, now called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), to involve them in new hideous operations planned,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in September.

Collaboration between the extremist armed groups currently in control of Syria and the Ukrainian military has been ongoing since 2022, when Russian media revealed that scores of HTS and ISIS militants were being sent to Ukraine to fight alongside Kiev’s forces against Russia. 

Bashar al-Assad has fled Syria to Moscow, where he has reportedly been granted asylum by Russia. The al-Qaeda affiliates who drove him out have declared victory for the “mujahideen” in Damascus. Both Biden and Netanyahu have publicly taken credit for assisting in the regime change, and of course Turkey’s Erdogan deserves a heavy share of credit as well.

And yet there’s still a bit of a taboo in mainstream western discourse around calling this a regime change operation backed by the US and its allies. We’re all meant to pretend this was a 100 percent organic uprising driven solely and exclusively by the people of Syria despite years and years of evidence to the contrary. We are meant to pretend this is the case even after we just watched the US power alliance crush Syria using proxy warfare, starvation sanctions, constant bombing operations, and a military occupation explicitly designed to cut Syria off from oil and wheat in order to prevent its reconstruction after the western-backed civil war.

People get mad if you say this, but it’s true. It’s just a fact that major world events do not occur independently of the actions of the major world powers who have a vested interest in their outcomes. If my saying this makes you feel uncomfortable, that discomfort is called cognitive dissonance. It’s what being wrong feels like.

Maybe it bothers you when people point out the involvement of the US power alliance in Syria, and maybe you would prefer to believe that a plucky band of heroic freedom fighters bravely overthrew an evil supervillain dictator all on their own like some Hollywood movie. But real life doesn’t move in accordance with your preferences. In real life, the globe-spanning empire that is centralized around the United States will reliably be deeply involved in such events.

​https://x.com/AliAbunimah/status/1865834854404726991

When I say this you may want to believe I am “denying the agency of Syrians,” and that “denying agency” is the worst sin a person can possibly commit. But nothing I’m saying actually contradicts the idea that Syrians have their own agency. Obviously there were many Syrians who wanted Assad gone, and obviously there were many people who had their own reasons for fighting him which had nothing to do with the US empire. There is no contradiction between this obvious fact and the well-documented reality that the US-centralized power structure has been balls deep in Syria from the very beginning of the violence in 2011, and that its involvement led to the events we are seeing today.

The claim isn’t that the US empire controlled the minds of Syrians and forced them to turn against their government with no agency of their own. The claim is that the empire put a big fat thumb on the scale to ensure that one group of Syrians got their way instead of a different group.

You can argue that western regime change interventionism will lead to positive results this time (so long as you’re prepared to ignore mountains of historical evidence consistently demonstrating the opposite), but what you cannot do on any rational basis is deny that western regime change interventionism occurred in Syria.

Western liberalism is funny in that its adherents lean heavily on their ability to psychologically compartmentalize away from the actions of the western empire, and indeed away from the very existence of that empire. The western liberal lives in an imaginary alternate universe where western powers pretty much mind their own business and western leaders passively watch violence and destruction unfold around the world whilst pleading for peace and diplomacy from their podiums. They pretend the empire does not exist, and that it is only by pure coincidence that conflicts, coups and uprisings keep occurring in ways which favor the strategic interests of Washington.

In reality it is impossible to understand what’s going on in the world unless you understand that the US is the hub of an undeclared empire which has been working tirelessly to bring the global population under a single power umbrella over which it presides. The few countries who have successfully resisted being absorbed into this imperial blob are the Official Bad Guys we westerners are all trained to hate: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and a few socialist states in Latin America. I used to include Syria in this list, but that’s over now. Syria has been absorbed into the blob of the empire.

And tomorrow the imperial blob will move its crosshairs on to the next unabsorbed nation. That’s the underlying dynamic behind all the major conflicts on earth. This dynamic gets redacted from the mainstream western worldview with the assistance of the western propaganda services known as the mass media, as well as the western indoctrination system known as schooling. This dynamic is redacted from our worldview and hidden from our attention by the plutocrats and empire managers who work to manipulate our information systems, because otherwise we would realize that the US empire is the most tyrannical and abusive power structure on this planet today.

And it unquestionably is. No other power structure has spent the 21st century killing people by the millions in wars of aggression while circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and working continuously to crush any group which opposes its dictates anywhere on earth. Not China. Not Russia. Not Iran. Not Cuba. Not Bashar al-Assad. Only the US empire has been tyrannizing and abusing the world to this extent in modern times.

And now the imperial blob rolls on to absorb its next target, having grown one Syria-sized increment larger after spending years digesting that nation via proxy warfare, sanctions, relentless bombing campaigns from Israel, and a military occupation designed to steal its food and fuel.

Our world cannot know peace as long as we are ruled by an empire that is fueled by endless rivers of human blood. Here’s hoping the end of that empire comes sooner rather than later.

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​On November 8, Syrian opposition forces captured the capital, Damascus, marking the end of President Bashar al-Assad’s government. On the same day, Voice of America Chinese quickly declared that “China has lost an ally,” claiming that China’s Belt and Road investments in Syria would suffer losses amounting to tens of billions of dollars.

However, Chinese strategist Professor Wang Xiangsui argues that VOA’s assessment is entirely wrong. He believes the Syrian crisis is instead offer new opportunities for the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in the Middle East and could even accelerate the collapse of U.S. unipolar hegemony.

Firstly, Syria’s strategic value to the BRI is overhyped by the Western Media.

Syria is not located along the overland route of BRI. Additionally, Syria is not a major oil-producing country. According to British Petroleum’s statistics, Syria accounted for only 0.05% of global oil production as of 2016. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported that bilateral trade between China and Syria amounted to just $358 million in 2023. In comparison, China’s total import-export trade volume in 2023 was $5.94 trillion, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. This means Syria’s role in China’s foreign trade is negligible, with a direct impact of only 0.006%. Clearly, VOA has grossly exaggerated the implications of Syria’s situation for China’s overseas interests.

Secondly, the upheaval in Syria could strengthen Iran-China cooperation.

In March 2021, China and Iran signed a 25-Year Comprehensive Cooperation Plan. However, progress in certain areas, particularly the oil and gas industries, has been slow due to disagreements over pricing and infrastructure development.  

Three years ago, Iran was reluctant to engage in full-scale confrontation with the U.S. or military conflict with Israel. But the civil war in Syria has fragmented Iran’s sphere of influence, cornering it in terms of core national interests.  

As direct conflict with the U.S. and Israel becomes increasingly inevitable, Iran’s need for collaboration with China will grow, creating greater urgency for substantive cooperation. This is advantageous for advancing the Belt and Road Initiative. Previously, one of the biggest challenges for the BRI was that China needed to explain to the Middle Eastern countries that the benefits of changing the status quo outweigh the risks, leaving it in a passive position during negotiations. Now, if the turmoil in Syria heightens the sense of urgency among international communities, they will be more inclined to cooperate with China, which would significantly benefit the BRI’s expansion.

Thirdly, Israel’s opportunism in Syria will deepen U.S. entanglement in the Middle East, hastening the decline of U.S. hegemony.

According to Al Jazeera, on December 8, Israeli forces occupied the Syrian-controlled area of the Golan Heights. This marks the first open entry of Israeli ground forces into Syrian territory since the Yom Kippur War. Such a military venture is bound to exacerbate tensions between Israel and the Arab world. In the next four years, this could trigger more conflicts, creating additional aid burdens for the U.S. as it supports Israel. Meanwhile, the White House will have no choice but to foot the bill, as the Trump administration has been dominated by pro-Israel officials. Future U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are staunch Israel supporters, and even Trump’s daughter is married into a Jewish family.  

From Rome to Britain, every empire’s decline begins with a mismatch between ambition and capability. Trump recognized that spreading resources thin in Ukraine and Israel would weaken the U.S. in its competition with China and sought to refocus through his “America First” policy. However, Israel’s opportunism in Syria will make it impossible for him to realise this vision, as Israel will always take precedence over the U.S. in the current administration.

Prof. Wang points out that there will be no second “American Century.” What follows will not be a “Chinese Century” either but rather a truly multipolar world. What we are witnessing in Syria is an ulcer in the U.S.-led world order. With Syria now fragmented among various factions, we are witnessing the collapse of the old order, which has yet to give rise to a new one. During this transitional phase, nations have significant opportunities. However, it is evident that multipolarity will emerge as the dominant global trend.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken repeated the US government’s new position that Ukraine needs to start sending 18 to 25 year-olds to fight in its war with Russia, telling Reuters on Monday that “getting younger people into the fight, we think, many of us think, is necessary.” This comes even as polls have begun showing that Ukrainians favor making a deal with Russia to end this war as quickly as possible.
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This is one of those things that looks more evil the longer you stare at it. They’re pushing for teenagers to be thrown into the fires of an unwinnable war like it’s nothing — like a corporation saying they need to hire more staff to accommodate their growing business. And why? To tie up Russia so that Syria can be turned into a smoking crater and allow the US war machine to focus its crosshairs on Iran and China, with the end goal of total planetary domination. All because some swamp monsters decided after the fall of the Soviet Union that the US must maintain unipolar global hegemony no matter the cost.

Ukraine barely even has anyone in the country from ages 18 to 25 for various reasons (many of which predate this war), but the managers of the US-centralized empire are pushing to scrape out the few they do have and toss them into the landmines and artillery fire just to keep this unwinnable war going for a few more months. Whether they succeed or not, the fact that they even tried is so profoundly psychopathic it’s actually hard to wrap your mind around.

You won’t see anyone in Tony Blinken’s family headed to the frontlines in Ukraine. These freaks see the population of this planet as nothing more than pawns on their grand chessboard, and they will sacrifice them just as casually.
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Watching the internet light up with joy over the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has been interesting. We don’t know what the motives of the actual shooter were as of this writing, but the disgust and rage the public holds toward wealthy exploitative parasites these days is becoming more and more incendiary.

Watching all this I keep finding myself thinking of that JFK quote “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.” What are the people meant to do when predatory megacorporations ruin lives by the thousands? Write them sternly worded letters? Vote the corporations out of office? Their options have been closed to them.
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You can’t be anti-racist and pro-Israel; they are mutually contradictory positions. Israel is an apartheid state, arguably the most racist society on this planet. If you support Israel you support racism, whether you admit this about yourself or not.
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Al-Qaeda in Syria keeps changing its name for the same reason the military contractor formerly known as Blackwater keeps changing its name: it’s a rebranding to rescue its damaged reputation, stifle public outcry, and ensure further funding from the US government.
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The “left” is divided on Syria only in the same way it’s divided on Ukraine and other conflicts: Marxists, dedicated peace activists and opponents of the western empire on one side; shitlibs, NATO simps and anarkiddies on the other. The high level of leftish unity we’ve been seeing between those two groups on Gaza this past year is the exception, not the norm.
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You see this split pop up on issue after issue, and it basically boils down to a divide between those who recognize the US-centralized empire as the world’s most murderous and tyrannical power structure vs those who swallow western propaganda spin to some extent.

​On November 30, Donald Trump nominated Kash Patel to serve as FBI director. A staunch MAGA activist and loyalist with significant standing in Trump’s orbit, Patel aligns closely with the president-elect on both domestic and foreign policy matters. Indeed, he appears to struggle to pinpoint areas of disagreement with Trump’s agenda.

Patel has consistently advocated for a hardline approach to China and is an unabashed supporter of Israeli interests, often prioritizing them over U.S. considerations. On October 7, marking the first anniversary of the Hamas attack, Patel delivered a fiery interview on Fox News. During the segment, he vowed that the incoming Trump administration would intensify its crackdown on anti-Israeli elements.

We should be side by side [with Israel]…When we are back in power with President Trump…we will shut off the machinery that feeds money into Iran…We need America to wake up and prioritize Israel, and that is not what Kamala Harris is about, we need to bring home Americans and end this war, bring home Israelis, and stand by our number one ally in Israel, and people need to wake up on November 5.”

A relative political outsider who has never occupied high office, the media has been awash with profiles of Patel and fevered speculation about what his management of the Bureau could mean in practice ever since. In the process, he has been subject to a level of mainstream scrutiny and criticism that was entirely lacking over recent weeks, as Trump filled his cabinet with a rogue’s gallery of dedicated hawks, hardcore pro-Israeli elements, and characters both unknown and notorious with potential extremist ties and views.

For some, the composition of Trump’s cabinet is a crushing disappointment. On November 9, Trump caused shockwaves when he announced neither Nikki Haley nor Mike Pompeo would be invited to join his administration in any capacity. The news, coupled with comments he made in a late October appearance on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast, perked optimism in some quarters that the President-elect’s longstanding anti-war posturing could produce real-world results in Ukraine, if not elsewhere.

In his discussion with Rogan, Trump professed that “the biggest mistake” of his first term was he “picked a few people that I shouldn’t have picked” – “neocons or bad people or disloyal people,” among them John Bolton. Haley was the U.S. ambassador to the UN under Trump and perhaps the most ardent, outspoken Zionist ever to fill the role. She, Bolton and Pompeo – who personally orchestrated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani’s assassination, among other hostile deeds – were widely regarded as the administration’s leading hawks.

Yet, any slight hope that the pair’s absence from Trump’s new White House might herald an influx of some doves and, in turn, a more peaceful shift from the U.S. government was comprehensively dashed when the President’s transition team nominations began rolling in. Now the cabinet is fully stocked, countless millions around the world have urgent and grave concerns about what the future could hold for them, their families, countries, regions, and more.

In particular, Trump’s prospective government can already claim the mantle of the most fervently pro-Israel in U.S. history. This is despite replacing an administration that has done more than any before to accelerate, encourage, and facilitate Israel’s war on Gaza. The prospect that Tel Aviv’s deadly assaults on Gaza and Lebanon will escalate somehow further is now not only very real but seemingly inevitable. However, as we shall see, there are minor rays of hope among the mass doom and gloom.

‘Promised Land’
​
New Secretary of State Marco Rubio hardly needs any introduction as one of the most pro-war members of the modern U.S. political class. Since his career kicked off in 2000, he has been consistently among the loudest voices on how America’s officially designated enemy states should be dealt with, be that China, Iran, Venezuela, or otherwise. Threats of sanctions, coups, and military intervention are almost a daily staple of his political oratory.

​A close friend of Benjamin Netanyahu, in 2019, Rubio cosponsored a Senate resolution condemning UN Security Council resolutions designating Jewish settlement expansion in occupied Palestine as a violation of international law. He has referred to Israel’s mass murder in Gaza since October 7, 2023, as legitimate self-defense, claimed Hamas is “100% to blame” for any civilian casualties inflicted by the horrific onslaught, and ominously declared Palestinian resistance must be “eradicated,” as Tel Aviv cannot coexist “with these savages.”

The media has reported that the Trump administration is already concocting plans to “bankrupt Iran” with “maximum pressure” upon taking office. Rubio, who has long called for tightening already crippling sanctions on Tehran, is reportedly at the forefront of this effort, alongside nominated National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, a Pentagon journeyman who previously sat on the House Armed Services Committee. At an event convened by NATO adjunct the Atlantic Council, in October, Waltz bragged:

Just four years ago…[Iran’s] currency was tanking, they were truly on the back foot…we need to get back to that posture.”

Neutralizing Iran has long been touted as a prerequisite for reclaiming Israel’s waning dominance in West Asia. Any measure that destabilizes Tehran—economically, militarily, or politically—diminishes its capacity to curb Israel’s actions, leaving Tel Aviv emboldened to act without restraint. The logic is stark: weakening Iran strengthens Israel. Within the Trump administration, with its hawkish alignment, policies serving this end will likely be met with uncritical endorsement.

Already, Trump has pledged to lift the few remaining restrictions and end delays in the supply of military equipment and ammunition to Israel immediately after his inauguration. This includes an embargo on certain weapons shipments and limitations on various combat-related equipment. This embargo reportedly impacts Israel’s war-fighting capabilities, as its forces struggle with multiple self-initiated active battle fronts, requiring “strict control” over ammunition supply and use.

The pro-Israel credentials of Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Michael Waltz are unquestionable. Yet their fervor for supporting Israel’s controversial policies pales in comparison to some of President-elect Donald Trump’s other nominees. Take Mike Huckabee, the ultraconservative former Arkansas governor and twice-failed presidential candidate, now tapped to serve as U.S. ambassador to Israel. Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist pastor, wasted no time declaring his intentions. He vowed to publicly refer to Israel in biblical terms, calling it the “Promised Land,” and proclaimed that Jews hold a “rightful deed” to Palestinian territory.

‘American Crusade’

Despite its unwavering consensus on Israel, Trump’s cabinet has been labeled “eclectic” by the mainstream press—and not without cause. Alongside establishment stalwarts like Huckabee and Rubio, Trump has tapped figures long considered political outsiders. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a polarizing figure in his own right, has been nominated for a senior post. Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host and U.S. military veteran, has also emerged from the fringes to claim a role in Trump’s cabinet. Hegseth, who quietly advised Trump during his first term, pushed for the pardons of American soldiers convicted of heinous war crimes—a campaign that, in some cases, was effective.

Hegseth, a contender for Defense Secretary, has made his allegiances to Israel unmistakably clear. He has described Israel’s settler population as “God’s chosen people.” He has openly advocated for transforming Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque into a Jewish-only recreation of the historic Temple Mount, framing such an act as a “miracle.” At a 2018 National Council of Young Israel gala in New York City, Hegseth left no room for ambiguity:

 "Zionism and Americanism are the front lines of Western civilization and freedom in our world today.”

Such disturbing comments have elicited little media interest since Hegseth’s nomination. However, NPR has chronicled his unsettling array of tattoos, including a Jerusalem cross—a Christian emblem with origins in the Crusades—and the Latin phrase deus vult, often interpreted as a call to reclaim the Holy Land through the slaughter of Muslims. Both symbols have been co-opted by Neo-Nazi groups. Perhaps predictably, Hegseth’s 2020 book, “American Crusade,” brims with incendiary Islamophobic rhetoric.

Another wildcard nomination is Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence. Concurrently a politician and serving U.S. military officer, for years she occupied a dissident, dovish space on the Democrat left, all along smeared as an Assad or Putin apologist for her anti-war positions. However, she acrimoniously quit the party in October 2022, slamming it as “under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers who are driven by cowardly wokeness” and for purportedly “stoking anti-white racism.”
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Gabbard had, by that point, been distancing herself from previously held progressive stances on issues such as abortion and LGBTQ rights, and she has rapidly grown ever more conservative since formally joining the Republican party. Despite her longstanding criticism of U.S. military interventionism, Gabbard effusively supports Israel, opposing any limits on its assaults on Gaza and Lebanon. She has slandered protesters critical of Israel as “puppets” of a “radical Islamist organization,” accusing them of supporting Hamas.

​‘Maverick Appointment’

Despite her inflammatory rhetoric and overt support for Israel’s most belligerent policies, Gabbard’s nomination as Director of National Intelligence (DNI) could be a silver lining in Trump’s cabinet. The position wields immense power, coordinating the work of America’s sprawling intelligence apparatus across 18 agencies. Since the announcement, deep anxiety has rippled through intelligence circles on both sides of the Atlantic, with veterans voicing fears about the potential consequences of her leadership.

Trump spent much of his first term at war with the U.S. intelligence community. The President and his supporters quite legitimately accuse the CIA, FBI et al. of seeking to undermine and sabotage his first term in office. On November 24, The Economist forecast—based on interviews with U.S. and European intelligence officials—a “likely” mass exodus from American spying agencies, as many operatives are “fearful of falling foul” of Trump and Gabbard, under whom “spies are on notice.”

Gabbard’s disdain for America’s spy agency alphabet soup was writ large in her April book, “For Love of Country.” She blamed the CIA, FBI, “and a whole network of rogue intelligence and law enforcement agents working at the highest levels” of the U.S. government, in conjunction with “the Democratic National Committee, propaganda media, [and] Big Tech” for America’s most egregious ills. She declared this shadowy nexus “so dangerous that even our elected officials are afraid to cross them.”

Gabbard reserves some of her sharpest criticism for the intelligence community’s role in fueling the Ukraine proxy war, accusing it of laying the groundwork for conflict to benefit defense contractors. “How would their friends in the military-industrial complex make trillions of dollars from the fear they fomented in America and Europe by stoking the fires of the new Cold War?” she wrote. American spies, it seems, are taking her seriously. “We are all reeling,” a “current intelligence official who’s worked through multiple administrations” told TIME magazine following the announcement of her nomination.

​Per The Daily Telegraph, the intelligence community in London is likewise “alarmed” by Gabbard’s nomination. The doggedly pro-Ukraine outlet quoted a number of “British defence figures” which slammed the move in the harshest possible terms. Disgraced former MI6 chief Richard Dearlove attacked the “maverick appointment,” lambasting her lack of “experience of intelligence and security.” Elsewhere, former British Army tank commander Hamish de Bretton Gordon angsted that the “special relationship” between Britain and the US “could be impacted.”

The perspectives of Dearlove and de Bretton Gordon are striking, for both have long histories of exploiting the “special relationship” to further London’s ends and bounce the U.S. intelligence and military establishment into war. MI6 chief Dearlove was responsible for cooking up false intelligence that formed the basis of the formal British and U.S. case for invading Iraq. The subsequent Chilcot Inquiry was completely damning of his activities in this regard.

Its report noted that Dearlove personally informed Prime Minister Tony Blair that Baghdad could definitively strike Britain with chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes, and this information had been provided to MI6 by an Iraqi with “phenomenal access” to the highest levels of Saddam Hussein’s government. That false claim was central to London’s justification for war and much repeated in the media at the time. In reality, British spies were furnished with the claim “indirectly” by a taxi driver.

‘Perfect Nominee’

More recently, Dearlove was a central figure in Russiagate and a prominent advocate for the credibility of former MI6 operative Christopher Steele and his ‘Trump-Russia’ dossier in the media, despite the document’s self-evident falsity and concerns about its veracity within British and U.S. intelligence circles. Russiagate was clearly intended to ensure relations between Washington and Moscow didn’t improve under Trump, and were it not for the belligerent stance resultantly taken by his administration, the Ukraine proxy war could well have been avoided.

Hamish de Bretton Gordon also played a personal role in pushing for a U.S. war in Syria. He was part of an MI6 operation that smuggled soil samples out of Syria, purportedly to prove the Syrian government’s responsibility for chemical weapons attacks. These samples were later revealed to be falsified. A senior Western source acknowledged in August 2013 that the true aim of British intelligence was to pressure Washington into direct boots-on-the-ground military intervention, ala Iraq.

While that catastrophic outcome was avoided, a supposed government chemical weapons attack in Douma in April 2018 succeeded in pushing Trump to launch missile strikes against Syria. Leaked documents and independent investigations have since revealed that this incident was staged by British intelligence operatives and their assets. Notably, Gabbard publicly criticized Trump’s response, questioning whether Douma was a staged ruse by the opposition to prolong the conflict at a time when the White House appeared ready to de-escalate.

With Gabbard in the role of DNI, the sway of intelligence agencies over political decisions and the readiness of figures like Rubio, Trump and Waltz to act on dubious intelligence could be blunted. While this may not provide immediate solace to the Palestinians, who remain under constant threat of death and displacement, it could signal a positive shift in the unchecked influence of British and U.S. intelligence on the White House.

These tentative grounds for optimism are somewhat reinforced by Patel’s nomination as FBI director.
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As a committed Israel-firster, he comfortably aligns with the rest of Trump’s prospective cabinet, and one might expect that mainstream news outlets eager to advance a pro-Israel agenda would embrace him as a result. Yet the media’s response has been anything but supportive. The New York Times warns that Patel would bring “bravado and baggage” to the role, while The Washington Post branded him a “dangerous and unqualified choice” to lead the Bureau.

The Atlantic, run by long-time pro-Israel activist Jeffrey Goldberg, has intensified this scrutiny of Patel, publishing multiple hit pieces in recent weeks. A November 30 op-ed warned that senior FBI officials “would likely resign rather than serve under Patel, which would probably suit Trump just fine.” The article concluded, “If Trump’s goal is to break the FBI and undermine its missions, Kash Patel is the perfect nominee.” This may well be one of the administration’s core objectives—on top of galvanizing Israel.

Patel has vowed that a future Trump administration would “come after” government officials, intelligence agency leaders, journalists, and other establishment figures he associates with what he describes as the “Russiagate hoax.” It’s hardly surprising that these same factions view his rise—and the broader ascent of a new administration—with trepidation.

Like Gabbard, Patel’s combative disdain for the U.S. deep state offers little solace. His stance does not mitigate, let alone counteract, his Pro-Israel leanings or the Trump administration’s aggressive resolve to ensure that Israel’s actions in Gaza, which human rights groups characterize as a genocide, proceed to their grim conclusion.
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Yet, one might argue that the left could find itself in a stronger position to oppose the ongoing atrocities in Gaza under a Republican administration that makes no pretense of sympathy for the Palestinians. Unlike Democratic governments, which weaponize progressive rhetoric to attempt to shame solidarity activists and progressive dissidents into supporting its doggedly pro-Israel actions, the Trump administration’s overtly pro-Israel stance strips away such falsifications. And the possibility that entrenched institutions like the CIA and FBI—longstanding adversaries of progress and justice in America—might finally face accountability for their actions could be a potential silver lining. Watch this space.

​We now know most of what happened on that dark day of November 22, sixty-one years ago.  After many years of competing theories, we now have solid evidence that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was planned and carried out by the CIA, in retaliation for the peace project of JFK’s short-lived presidency.  Kennedy’s project for peace included peace initiatives with respect to Russia, Vietnam, and Cuba; sustained private dialogue with Nikita Khrushchev; the signing of a nuclear test ban treaty as a first step toward complete disarmament, sustained through the development of institutions of cooperation in commerce and science; and support for and cooperation with Sukarno and the emerging Non-Aligned Movement.

We now know these important facts of American history as a result of the 2008 book by James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, which presents the hypothesis that the CIA coordinated the assassination of a president who rejected the fundamental assumptions of the national security state, and who was actively engaged in pursuing initiatives that circumvented the structures of the state, including direct appeals to the people, who supported, Kennedy found, his gestures and initiatives toward peace.  Douglass’ conclusions are well documented in the 518-page book, which puts together the various pieces by carefully examining all the available evidence, some of which gradually emerged over the years.    

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The Cold War and JFK’s counterproject of world peace

Although the woke Left liked to condemn the American republic for slavery, conquest, and racism, in fact conquest is a normal human tendency, ironically providing the foundation for progress in economic development, science, philosophy, literature, and moral norms.  The real test of the social and moral qualities of a conquering power comes following the conquest, and it is measured by the extent to which it uses the structures and advances attained through conquest to construct a society with justice for all.

In the case of the USA, the period of conquest began prior to its founding as a Republic and continued to the end of World War II, by which time it had arrived to be the hegemonic power of the modern world-system, which had been formed by the Western European conquest of the world beginning in the sixteenth century.  As the hegemonic power in a world-system that was in transition to neocolonialism, the USA was perfectly positioned to lead the world toward a post-colonial world-system that recognizes the sovereignty of all nations and constructs peace and prosperity on the institutional foundation of mutually beneficial trade among nations.

However, the USA at that critical historic moment took a dark turn.  It turned toward confrontation with its principal rival, the USSR, and with the emerging nations of the Third World, which were calling for a more just world order that uses the structures imposed by colonialism to develop a modern, equal, and just world, in which all nations have the possibility for modern economic and social development.  The U.S. turn to confrontation occurred in a historic moment in which progress through conquest was no longer possible, and a world of competing imperialisms was no longer sustainable.  It was justified through a Cold War ideology that falsely cast the Soviet Union as expansionist in its foreign policy. 

The CIA was created by the National Security Act of 1947, which established, in addition to the CIA, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Security Council.  On June 18, 1948, President Harry Truman issued a top-secret directive that authorized the CIA to engage in sabotage and subversion against hostile states.  The order was in violation of international law, and it established official lying as necessary to prevent covert activities from being known by the people.

JFK’s differences with his own government, and especially with its national security sector, were visible even before Kennedy took office.  As a Senator, even though JFK strongly embraced Cold War premises, he sometimes broke ranks with the West with respect to colonial wars, as was reflected in his support for the independence of Algeria.  With respect to Indochina, he cautioned that military assistance has limits, and he ridiculed the notion that military force can conquer a so-called enemy of the people that “has the sympathy and covert support of the people.”  As Chair of the African Subcommittee, Kennedy said to the Senate in 1959, “Call it nationalism, call it anti-colonialism, call it what you will, Africa is going through a revolution. . ..  The word is out—and spreading like wildfire in nearly a thousand languages and dialects—that it is no longer necessary to remain forever poor and in bondage.”    

A definitive breaking of trust between President Kennedy and the CIA occurred in April 1961.  The CIA had trained Cuban exiles in a secret base in Guatemala for an invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.  In reluctantly approving the plan, JFK made clear that there would be no military intervention with U.S. troops, even if the exile brigade faced defeat.  Kennedy realized following the failed invasion that he had been drawn into a trap by the CIA, in which he was faced with the choice of accepting defeat or escalating the battle.  The authors of the plan “assumed that he would be forced by circumstances to drop his advance restrictions against the use of U.S. combat forces.”  In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs defeat, Kennedy asked the three leaders of the failed operation to resign, namely, CIA Director Allen Douglas, Deputy Director Richard Bissel Jr., and Deputy Director General Charles Cabell.  He also cut the CIA’s budget, aiming at a 20% reduction by 1966.  And he tried through executive memoranda to redefine the agency’s mission and reduce its power.

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev initiated private correspondence with Kennedy on September 29, 1961, with a letter that was twenty-six pages long, during the Berlin crisis.  For the next two years, Khrushchev and Kennedy exchanged at least twenty-one secret letters, which included discussion of the possibilities for peaceful coexistence and of the need to avoid another world war.  They also discussed the constraints placed on them by their respective states.  The correspondence between them was helpful in avoiding a military confrontation during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and in making possible a private agreement, according to which the Soviets would withdraw its missiles from Cuba, and the USA would dismantle the missiles that it had installed in Turkey.  The American military chiefs were outraged that Kennedy had not taken advantage of the situation created by the discovery of Soviet missiles to attack Cuba.   

On June 10, 1963, Kennedy delivered an address at American University in Washington, in which Kennedy announced his decision for peace, taken against the advice of his political and military advisors, excepting Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.  He declared:

Kennedy further asserted that “both the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies, have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race.”  He further declared that a general and complete disarmament is the primary long-range interest of the United States, a disarmament designed to take place in stages, accompanied by the development of new institutions of peace.  To this end, Kennedy announced that he, Khrushchev, and British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan had agreed to hold discussions in Moscow on a test-ban treaty.

Kennedy attended personally to working out with the U.S. negotiating team the details of the proposed nuclear test-ban treaty.  There was strong opposition to the treaty from the Joint Chiefs and the CIA, as well as in the U.S. Congress, all under the influence of Cold War assumptions.  Kennedy therefore went on a whirlwind public education campaign on the treaty, and he found that his message was well received by the people.  In September 1963, public opinion polls showed that 80% of the people were in favor of the Treaty.  It was ratified by the Senate on September 24, 1963, by a vote of 80 to 19, fourteen votes more than the required two-thirds majority.

Kennedy also sought better relations with Indonesia’s Sukarno, who was a guest at the White House in 1961.  On August 16, 1962, Kennedy issued a national security memorandum countering CIA plots against Sukarno and ordering the State Department, Defense Department, CIA, AID, and the U.S. Information agency to take a more positive approach to Indonesia that would seek a new and better relation.  A reciprocal visit by JFK to Indonesia was scheduled for the spring of 1964, for which Sukarno had promised the U.S. President “the grandest reception anyone ever received here,” while Kennedy viewed his visit as a way of dramatizing in a very visible manner Kennedy’s support for Third World nationalism.  The event, to the world’s misfortune, was cancelled by Kennedy’s assassination.  Sukarno was at that time a leading figure in the Non-Aligned Movement, which today consists of 120 member states, and which advocates for the step-by-step construction of an alternative world order based in respect for the sovereignty of all nations, non-interference in the affairs of states, and mutually beneficial trade among nations. 

In March 1963, Kennedy initiated a new approach with respect to Cuba.  The USA began a crackdown on Cuban émigré groups, preventing them from using U.S. territory to launch raids against Cuba, although Kennedy continued authorizing covert CIA operations against Cuba.  In September, Kennedy initiated an indirect dialogue with Fidel Castro through intermediaries, which was still in process at the time of Kennedy’s assassination.  Fidel of course responded favorably to this initiative; normal relations with the United States had been a persistent proposal of the Cuban Revolutionary Government since 1959.

With respect to Vietnam, Kennedy agreed to send military advisors, support units, and helicopters to Vietnam, but not combat troops.  In his exceptional and honest memoir on the Vietnam War, Robert McNamara affirms that Kennedy was persistently opposed to sending combat troops to Vietnam, convinced that South Vietnamese leaders can only attain their nation’s sovereignty by themselves, with U.S. help, but primarily on the basis of their own legitimacy in the eyes of the people.  As Kennedy became convinced that the government of South Vietnam was not up to the task, he turned toward withdrawal.  He told McNamara to order the military to draw up plans for withdrawal, concerning which the military was dragging its feet.  On October 11, 1963, the president’s National Action Security Memorandum Number 263 mandated the withdrawal of 1,000 military personnel by the end of the year and the withdrawal of the bulk of U.S. personnel by the end of 1965.  With JFK’s assassination within six weeks, the executive order was never implemented, and it was never announced to the public.

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The CIA plan to assassinate the president

In the context of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, there was a naval intelligence program in which approximately three dozen young men were sent to the Soviet Union, presenting themselves as disenchanted with American society and wanting to learn about communism, with the intention of developing useful connection with Soviet intelligence, working covertly for the CIA.   It seems that one of them was Lee Harvey Oswald, who in 1957 and 1958 had been a Marine Corps radar operator in a U.S. Air Force base in Japan.  He had a high security clearance and listened regularly to radio communications among U.S. secret U-2 spy planes flying over the Soviet Union and China.  On October 31, 1959, two months after being discharged from the Marine Corps, Oswald renounced his U.S. citizenship at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, and he affirmed his allegiance to the Soviet Union.  He further declared he had told Soviet officials that he would make known to them information concerning U.S. radar operations. 

Oswald returned to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow after working for over a year in a factory in Minsk.  The Embassy made no effort to prosecute him for his defection, and it lent him money to return to the United States.  Once back in the USA, it seems that Oswald was working for the CIA as an agent provocateur, presenting himself as a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and as a defender of Cuban socialism, distributing leaflets and conducting street theater designed to attract media attention, for the purpose of discrediting the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. 

In his role as CIA agent provocateur, Oswald, without his knowledge, was being set up as a patsy and a scapegoat for the assassination of the president.  Russia and Cuba were intended as secondary scapegoats.  Using Oswald’s feigned support for the Soviet Union and Cuba to create the belief that the alleged assassin of the president was an agent of the Soviet Union and/or Cuba, public opinion could be rallied toward support for war with Russia and Cuba.

Douglass thoroughly documents the fact that over the years, various people have come forward with testimony indicating that the shots that killed President Kennedy were fired from a grassy knoll to the front of the presidential motorcade, and not from the Texas School Book Depository that the motorcade had passed, where Oswald was located.  This accumulating testimony, gradually overcoming fear, pertains to Oswald’s various movements prior to the assassination, observations of the shooting, the escape routes of the shooters and Oswald, and medical observations of the president’s fatal wounds.

President Lyndon B. Johnson, upon being informed following the assassination of the CIA plan, refused to use Oswald’s feigned Soviet and Cuban connections to arouse public passion for war with Russia and Cuba, because it was evident that neither Russia nor Cuba had anything to do with the assassination.  Nor did LBJ authorize investigation of the CIA’s involvement in the affair, which if made known, could have provoked a public outcry that would have resulted in the dismantlement of the CIA as well as intense internal conflict in the nation.  Instead, Johnson created the Warren Commission, privately advising key members of the Commission to avoid all questions that would lead to revealing who Oswald really was and the role of the CIA in the Kennedy assassination.  Accordingly, the Commission created the narrative that Oswald was a loner who was alienated from others and hostile to his environment and who had acted alone, a narrative that had many internal contradictions and inconsistencies with known facts, with the consequence that the Commission’s conclusions were never completely accepted by the people.

At the same time, having internalized Cold War anti-communist assumptions, LBJ was genuinely not in agreement with JFK’s peace project, which he quietly set aside. Immediately following the assassination, LBJ met with Kennedy’s advisors on Vietnam, all of whom, with the exception of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, were opposed to Kennedy’s peace project.  As is made clear in Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s memoir on the Vietnam War, LBJ’s orientation was clear at that initial meeting: the USA must and will win the war in Vietnam. 

Moreover, JFK’s initiatives toward Cuba were dropped.  Cuba was not informed of the shift, in spite of Fidel’s efforts to communicate his continued interest in rapprochement and a normal relation between Cuba and the USA. 

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Final considerations

The unspeakable crime of the CIA destroyed emerging prospects for peace and sustained world cooperation at a critical time in human history.  As such, it was a crime against the people of the United States and the peoples of the world.

The people of the United States should know of John F. Kennedy’s determined and courageous effort to establish peaceful co-existence among world powers as well as structures of peace and cooperation among nations, including cooperation between the Global North and South, which today remains a key demand and hope of the once-colonized peoples of the earth.   

The people of the United States should know the story of JFK and the CIA.  It is not a question of attacking the legacy of blameworthy individuals.  Rather, it is a question of identifying pitfalls to the construction of peace, so that collective political intelligence can be mobilized to overcome them.

SEOUL, South Korea (RTSG) – On December 3rd, residents of the capital of the Republic of Korea were rudely awakened in the middle of the night to the sounds of helicopters and jets flying over their houses after the president declared martial law. President Yoon Soek-Yeol gathered an emergency meeting of the press at 10:23 PM to announce the establishment of martial law in the country, decrying what he called “North Korean communist forces” that he alleged were “paralyzing the essential functions of the state and undermining the liberal democratic constitutional order.”

Lawmakers had to hop the fences of the National Assembly building, South Korea’s legislative meeting hall, to avoid police and military forces that had blocked off all entrances to the building. After thousands of protestors showed up outside the building, there was chaos between protestors and the military, though no deaths or injuries happened. After several hours of uncertainty, members of the South Korean parliament voted to lift the martial law at around 1 AM. By 2 AM, all troops had left the compound.

The events of December 3rd shocked not just the East Asian nation, but also the rest of the world. The Republic of Korea has not instituted martial law since 1980, and since then, the country has created ostensibly strong democratic systems. The events of this week seem to have disproved that assumption. The question remains: how did this happen?

President Yoon Seok-Yeol has been one of the Republic of Korea’s most unpopular presidents since his election in 2022, which he won with a barely 1% margin of victory. He and his party, the People’s Power Party (국민의힘), rode to victory promising deregulation and tax reductions. As a result, he was particularly popular among the youth in Seoul, the largest metropolitan area of South Korea. Now, however, it seems that his fortunes have changed significantly after repeated attacks from the opposition, the Democratic Party (더불어민주당). Suffering from one controversy to another, Yoon saw his approval ratings dip to 19% nationwide at the beginning of November.

Recently, the Democratic Party launched a prosecution targeting Yoon’s relationship with an election broker and owner of a polling agency. The election broker, named Myung Tae-Kyun, was under scrutiny for gloating that he held power over the President and his wife in a leaked phone call, and the president himself is under investigation for exercising inappropriate power over the People’s Power Party in selecting officials for election brokering and the like.

Additionally, Yoon’s presidency has seen a marked increase in tensions between North and South Korea, with the latter restarting several provocative military exercises against the North. North Korea (officially the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) has continued to respond to these advances in a tit-for-tat series of escalations, including dropping propaganda leaflets over the capital city of Seoul. Most recently however, the North accused the South of flying drones over the North’s capital city, Pyongyang.

Amidst all this pressure, Yoon declared martial law, primarily to stop the investigation and to “restore government functions.” However, lawmakers in South Korea are already preparing to remove the president, with six of the opposition parties banding together to draft an official motion to impeach Yoon. The People’s Power Party, despite opposing the declaration of martial law, has stated it will not support the motion to impeach. 

Al-Qaeda affiliates with a history of receiving western funding have reactivated in Syria along with Turkish-backed fighters to recapture significant amounts of territory in the war-ravaged nation.

It’s hard to say exactly what’s happening in the moment, but I will say it’s mighty convenient how Russia being tied up in Ukraine and Hezbollah being decapitated by Israel leaves Syria once again exposed to the longstanding regime change agendas of the same western empire who’s been backing both of those proxy conflicts.

Syria is more complicated and harder to understand than Gaza, but if you look into it you’ll find mountains of evidence that for many years the US and its allies and partners have been actively fomenting violence, chaos and destruction in that nation to effect regime change. Anyone who denies this is either ignorant or dishonest, as is anyone who calls you a Russian propagandist or an Assad lover for stating this well-evidenced fact.

There are a lot of people who see through the imperial lies about Gaza but still buy into the imperial lies about Syria, largely because the lies about Gaza are so much easier to see through. Immense amounts of propaganda and information ops have gone into framing the violence we’ve been seeing in Syria since 2011 as a completely organic rebellion against a tyrannical dictator who just wants to murder civilians because he is evil. But if you bring the same sincere curiosity and rigorous investigation to this issue that you brought to the plight of the Palestinians, you will discover the same kinds of lies and distortions which you’ve seen the western political/media class promote about Gaza being spun about Syria as well — frequently by the same people.

This is how unpacking the lies of the empire tends to unfold for folks. Your eyes flicker open because of some really obvious plot hole in the official narrative like Vietnam, the Iraq invasion, or Gaza, and then once you’ve seen through those lies you start getting curious about how else you’ve been deceived. You start pulling on other threads and learning more and more, and then after a while you start seeing the big picture about the US-centralized empire inflicting horrific abuses upon humanity all around the world with the goal of dominating the planet.

If you saw through the lies about Gaza, don’t stop there. Keep going. Keep pulling on threads. Keep learning. Stay curious. They lied about Gaza, they lied about Iraq, they lied about Libya, they lied about Ukraine, and they’re lying about Syria too. Don’t listen to anyone who tries to dull your curiosity. Ignore anyone who tries to shout you down and shut you up for asking inconvenient questions. Keep waking up from the matrix of empire propaganda until your eyes are truly clear.

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Boris Johnson told The Telegraph in a recent interview that the west is “waging a proxy war” in Ukraine, which, while obviously true, was once considered by the western political-media class to be a very taboo thing to say.

“We’re waging a proxy war, but we’re not giving our proxies the ability to do the job,” Johnson said. “For years now, we’ve been allowing them to fight with one hand tied behind their backs and it has been cruel.”

For years it was considered Kremlin propaganda to call the war in Ukraine a western proxy war against Russia. Now the line is “Well this is obviously a proxy war so we need to give our proxies more weapons, duh!”

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We’re taught that heroes look like western soldiers and cops taking out bad guys, when really heroes look like Palestinian journalists risking everything to tell the truth about genocidal atrocities that are backed by western governments while western journalists make propaganda.

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I don’t want the Australian government to ban kids from social media, I want the Australian government to stop supporting Israel’s genocidal atrocities and stop turning this country into a giant US military base in preparation for Washington’s war with China.

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It should be illegal to force homeless people to relocate. If a rich neighborhood is the best place to sleep rough then the rich should be forced to look at a daily reminder of the dystopia they live in until the underlying problems which cause homelessness have been fixed. You shouldn’t be allowed to hide such things to make people comfortable.

All the laws designed to criminalize homelessness and force the unhoused to relocate are just one more way our dystopia hides its abuses and contradictions from public view, the same as propaganda and internet censorship and murdering Palestinian journalists. They want the homeless out of sight and out of mind in the same way their wars and genocides are out of sight and out of mind.

They just want the homeless to go “away”, because they can’t fix the injustices and inequality which cause homelessness without upending the power structure they rule. They wish all the symptoms of poverty and injustice in our society could be hidden on the other side of vast oceans like their wars are.

The G20 summit in Rio earlier this week offered the quite intriguing spectacle of a deeply divided world, geopolitically and geoeconomically, trying to put on a brave ‘holiday in the sun’ face. 

There was plenty of fluff to amuse attentive audiences. French President Emmanuel Macron surrounded by a beefy security detail strolling on Copacabana beach near midnight; European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen barefoot in the sand, stunned by the lapping waves; the White House lodger, US President Joe Biden – with his expiry date in less than two months – missing the G20 family pic because he was talking to a palm tree. 

Right before the summit, Biden posed on a soundstage in the rainforest, complete with two giant teleprompters, pledging to save the Amazon just as his handlers in Washington let leak the “authorization” for Ukraine to attack targets inside the Russian Federation with ATACMS; a qualified preamble for a possible WWIII. 

With Rio providing the ultimately gorgeous set, at the very least, tempers at the renovated Museum of Modern Art, the G20 venue with the Sugarloaf in the background, were bound to mellow out. This even allowed for a short, tense handshake between Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a true leader of the Global South, and Argentina’s President Javier Milei, a US asset who hates Lula’s guts. 

China steals the show

The populist Brazilian head of state, whose political capital transcends all barriers, was, of course, an impeccable master of ceremonies, but the real star of the show was Chinese President Xi Jinping – fresh from his previous triumph, when he was for all practical purposes coronated King of Peru during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Lima - complete with the inauguration of the $1.3 billion port of Chancay, the new South American node of the Pacific Maritime Silk Road. 

As China is all about global connectivity corridors, Chancay-Shanghai became an instant new motto ringing all across the Global South. 

Beijing’s prime role as an engine and cooperation propeller across Asia–Pacific also applies to most of the G20 members. China is the largest trading partner of the 13 APEC economies, and is responsible for 64.2 percent of Asia-Pacific’s economic growth. 

This prime role extrapolates to China’s BRICS colleagues among the G20, as well as brand-new BRICS partner-nations such as Indonesia and Turkiye. Compare that with the G7/NATOstan contingent of the G20, starting with the United States, whose main global offerings range from Forever Wars and color revolutions to weaponizing of news and culture, trade wars, a tsunami of sanctions, and confiscation/theft of assets.    

So, predictably, there was some serious underlying tension permeating the G20, especially when it came to the face-off between the G7 and the Russia-China strategic partnership. Russian President Vladimir Putin didn’t even bother to attend, sending his uber-competent Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov instead. 

As for Beijing, after 7 years of combined Trump-Biden trade and tech war, the Chinese economy continues to grow by 5.2 percent a year. Exports now account for only 16 percent of China’s GDP, so the economic powerhouse is far less vulnerable to foreign trade machinations. And the US share of that 16 percent is now only 15 percent; that is, trade with the US represents only 2.4 percent of Chinese GDP. 

Even under what can be described as NATOstan’s all-out tech sanctions, Chinese tech firms are growing at warp speed. As a result, all western tech companies are in deep trouble: massive retrenchment, factory downsizes, and shutdowns. 

Meanwhile, China’s trade surplus with the rest of the world has expanded to a record one trillion US dollars. That’s what horrified Western economists qualify as China on a “collision course” with some of the world’s biggest – yet dwindling – economies.   

Efforts to ‘Ukrainize’ the G20 agenda

The Brazilians had to dodge quite a few precision bullets to extract some success out of this G20 summit. US Think Tankland, on the eve of the summit, went on an all-out propaganda campaign, accusing BRICS nations of doing nothing but posture and complain. The G20, on the contrary, with “all major creditors on the table,” might be able to redress “financial grievances” and development deficits. 

The Brazilians were clever enough to understand that an indebted NATO bloc exhibiting less than zero political leadership would do nothing under the G20 framework to redress “financial grievances,” not to mention contribute to “enfranchise” Global South nations. 

The only thing that would interest the Hegemon’s financial elites out of a G20 meeting is to “deepen partnerships,” a euphemism for further co-option and vassalization with an eye on 2026, when the US will host the G20.  

China, just like Brazil, had other ideas. Enter the campaign to fight hunger and poverty, officially launched in Rio. The Global Times has re-emphasized how China “has lifted all 800 million people out of poverty and achieved the poverty reduction goals of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development ahead of schedule.”

In his G20 speech, Xi called all members to “make a fresh start from Rio,” by practicing “inclusive globalization” and “true multilateralism.” NATOstan, as every grain of sand in the Sahel desert knows, simply abhors multilateralism. 

The official theme of the Rio G20 was “Building a Just World and a Sustainable Planet.” The Hegemon’s ruling classes, irrespective of who sits in the White House, are not interested in a “just world,” only in maintaining unilateral privilege. As for “sustainable planet,” it is code for what the Davos Gang wants: the toxic imbrication of interests of the UN, the World Economic Forum (WEF), and NATO. 

The G7/NATOstan did try by all means to hijack the agenda of the Rio G20, as confirmed by diplomatic sources. Yet the Brazilians stood firm in the defense of Global South-led multipolarity, negotiating a compromise agenda that, for all practical purposes, evaded getting deeper into the Hegemon's latest Forever Wars, Ukraine and Gaza. 

With NATOstan as a whole de facto supporting the Gaza genocide, the G20 85-point Final Declaration could, at best, offer a few consensual generalities, at least calling for a ceasefire in Gaza - which was promptly vetoed by the US at the UN Security Council immediately after the G20 summit's conclusion.  

Lavrov, at his G20 press conference, offered some extra nuggets. He said that while the west did “try to 'Ukrainize' the G20 agenda, other members insisted that other conflicts be included in the final declaration … Those countries reluctantly agreed to discuss the points of the G20 final declaration on the Middle East [West Asia].” 

Indonesia, India, Brazil, South Africa

Lula’s personal imprint at the G20 represented a Global South move: to establish an alliance against hunger, poverty, and social inequality, and at the same time impose extra taxation on the super-wealthy. The devil will be in the details, even as over 80 nations have already subscribed, plus the EU and the African Union (AU), along with several financial institutions and a series of NGOs.   

The alliance should, in principle, benefit 500 million people up to 2030, including the expansion of quality school meals for over 150 million children. It remains to be seen, for instance, how the AU will make it happen in practice. 

In the end, to a certain auspicious extent, the Rio G20 worked as a sort of complement to the BRICS summit in Kazan, trying to pave the way towards an inclusive multi-nodal world framed by social justice. 

Lula significantly stressed the key connection linking the latest G20s: the Global South - ranging from Indonesia, India, and now Brazil to South Africa, which will host the G20 next year, bringing “perspectives that interest the vast majority of the world’s population.” Incidentally, that, right there, includes three BRICS and one BRICS partner. 

On a personal level, it was quite an experience to observe the G20 fresh from a series of rich dialogues in South Africa itself, centered on the construction of African unity in a multipolar world. 

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa reiterated it when he said in Rio that this passing of the baton from Brazil is the “concrete expression of the historical, economic, social and cultural links that unite Latin America and Africa.” And unite, hopefully, the whole Global Majority.   

​They say those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it. Unfortunately, much of the public seems to have a rather selective memory where recent American history is concerned.  When examining the depraved actions confirmed to have been perpetrated by the United States government in recent decades and contrasting such an unflattering image of the American government with the portrait painted by apologists for the American political elite, one might conclude that much of the public has fallen victim to a disinformation campaign conducted by the mainstream media and their ruling class allies who would rather the population forget about their misdeeds.  Over the years, such misdeeds have included mind control experiments, lying the nation into war, mass surveillance, poisoning illegal substances to dissuade citizens from consuming them, and much more.  And yet, despite the many examples of how morally bankrupt the elite are in the United States government, there are still large swaths of the population who trust that the political establishment is acting in good faith or that such atrocities committed by the Unites States government could only have been perpetrated in the past. 

What those who come to the defense of the political elite do not realize is that one of the most overt examples of the United States government’s lack of morality is occurring in plain sight in the way the American government enforces the petrodollar system. But one might ask, “What is the petrodollar system?”  To understand the petrodollar system, historical context is vital. 

​Towards the end of the Second World War at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944, an assortment of Allied leaders met to establish a new economic world order.  From the ashes of the world economy stood the United States as the leading economic power and it was at the Bretton Woods Conference that a new monetary system that relied on the American currency was established.  According to such a system, the U.S. dollar could be converted into gold at a fixed rate while foreign currencies themselves were pegged to the American currency.  When a nation lost confidence in the U.S. dollar, they would have the option of exchanging their holdings in dollars for gold.  This system generated a demand for American currency and such a demand gave the United States government reason to print more money.  The Federal Reserve, a private banking entity, benefitted from a global demand for the U.S. dollar since it was the Federal Reserve that loaned the money to the United States government to be paid back with interest and it was the Federal Reserve that set the interest. 

When the Bretton Woods system was set up, it seemed that the answer to the problems faced by the global economy had arrived. Yet, the Bretton Woods system suffered from a severe Achilles’ heel. This Achilles’ heel was that this system was dependent on a stable American economy. In the 1960s, the American economy faced adversity due to the costs of the Johnson administration’s domestic programs whose stated aims were to alleviate poverty and the Vietnam War. Because of the economic woes facing the United States at the time, many a nation began to request gold in exchange for U.S. dollars. The days of the Bretton Woods system were numbered. 

1971 marked the death of the Bretton Woods system. It was in this year that President Nixon ended the convertibility of the U.S. dollar into gold. This had the effect of turning the U.S. dollar into a fiat currency, a currency whose value is not decided by another commodity. 

Following the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, it wouldn’t take long for a new economic arrangement to take shape. The Nixon administration was aware that the fall of the Bretton Woods system would cause an overall decline in demand for the U.S. dollar. However, an opportunity to generate demand for the U.S. dollar would present itself with the Yom Kippur War and later oil crisis. 

In 1973, a coalition of Arab nations attacked Israeli forces to take back territory seized by Israel during the Six-Day War. In retaliation for support given to Israel by the United States and other western nations, the Organization of Oil Exporting Countries enacted an oil embargo. As a result, the price of oil dramatically shot up. For his part, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger worked to negotiate an end to the embargo. Specifically, he worked out an agreement with the Saudi government in which Saudi Arabia would sell their oil in the U.S. dollar in exchange for weapons and the protection of Saudi oil fields by the United States Armed Forces. Not long thereafter, all the other OPEC nations agreed to sell their oil in American currency and the petrodollar system was born. 

With that historical context surrounding what the petrodollar system is in mind, one might ask, “What makes the petrodollar system so diabolical?”  The answer to that question can be found by examining how this system is enforced. Simply put, nations that jeopardize the petrodollar system often find themselves in the crosshairs of the globalists. The most infamous example of this kind of imperialism is the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War of 1991, the Iraqi economy was devastated by the sanctions imposed upon it. Among the sanctions was one that banned Iraq from exporting oil. This changed in the mid-90s with the creation of the Oil-for-Food Program, a program that allowed Iraq to sell oil in exchange for humanitarian needs. In 2000, the Iraqi government, believing the European market to be best, requested they be allowed to sell oil in the euro. Following the approval of the Iraqi request by the United Nations, the Unites States government, unwilling to allow the petrodollar system to be jeopardized, began a propaganda campaign to build a case for an invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of its dictator, Saddam Hussein. Much of this campaign was composed of lies. Arguably one of the most infamous of these lies was the claim that Iraq was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. Another of these lies came in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks when the Bush administration tried to link Saddam Hussein to the terrorist group implicated in the attack, Al-Qaeda. Yet, no link between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime was ever found. Furthermore, no weapons of mass destruction were ever discovered following the invasion. This means that the brave men and women of the United States Armed Forces who made the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq were sacrificed over the imperialistic agenda of the globalists who framed the war as a mercy mission to rid the world of a terrorist-supporting tyrant who was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. Yet, those who masterminded this illegal war have still not faced justice. 

However, the Iraq War is not the only example of this kind of imperialism. Other countries that have gone on to threaten the petrodollar system in one way or another have included Libya, Syria, and Iran. In the case of Libya, the globalists succeeded in regime change. As for Syria, the globalists are still trying to overthrow the regime of Bashar al-Assad. With regards to Iran, the United States and its allies spent two decades occupying Iran’s neighbors while perpetuating propaganda depicting Iran as a terrorist-supporting nation hell-bent on building nuclear weapons to attack Israel.  In short, this kind of imperialism persists to this day.  So, the next time someone you know makes the mistake of running defense for the corrupt ruling class, kindly remind them of this ongoing example of the lack of morals and ethics of the American political elite.