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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2021-017
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
1TVNewsAF @1TVNewsAF – 6:32 UTC · Feb 28, 2021
Sirajuddin Haqqani warns of never-seen-before fight if foreign troops don't exit Afghanistan by May.
"Today…we have the technology to use drones, we have our own missiles. This time if the Mujahideen resume fighting the enemies, it would be something they have never seen before."
Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald – 15:03 UTC · Feb 24, 2021
It took only two years to go from disappearing Milo and Alex Jones to banning content said to "amplify narratives that undermine faith in NATO."
Imagine where the line will be two years from now.
Censorship is an intoxicating power that endlessly expands until it's smashed.
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Other issues:
Use as open thread …
Alastair Crooke is by far the best writer/thinker published by Strategic-Culture. This week’s effort is revelatory yet again:
“A top Russian official, last weekend, said something which pinpoints the times we are living today. It may seem a throwaway remark, but behind it, just out of sight, lies something profound. He said that the JCPOA, (for very many, and not just for Iran), had become the prime symbol of how the rules-based global order is used precisely to squeeze-out a peoples’ sovereignty and autonomy – and to Gulliverise them into its Siamese twin, the rules-based monetary order….
“In the case of Iran, the superimposed ‘universal’ rules-of-the road were intended to supplant Iran’s NPT legal rights: to walk-back the Revolutionary impulse in Iran; drain its residue of radicalism through the drudgery of complying with tedious JCPOA rules; and ultimately force Iran’s assimilation into the global monetary governance too.
“Ok, nothing new – standard western procedure. Yet, those comments on how the JCPOA has become the icon on how to leach sovereignty from the blood of a nation speaks to a bigger shift affecting both Russia and Iran. They speak to a conversation in much of the world almost unimaginable within DC Beltway discourse….
“Russia’s 2007 insight was that the waters of the western spring-well of dynamism were becoming stagnant. In Davos last month, Putin suggested that the well-water was not just stagnant, but now contaminated. The western project had become stultified by the rigging of the entire system to the benefit of the 0.1%….
“Many Iranians have come to similar conclusion about Iran. When once most – maybe 80% – of Iranians would have wanted a feeler dipped into the well of western technical dynamism, today few want it. The danger to their own society of too close contact with stagnant water is obvious. Like Russia, they are focused on finding the inner energy from within their own resources and utilising the assets available to them. And discovering that those assets may be as present in Asia, as they once were in Europe.
“This is the ‘other’ conversation. Apart from the noisy narratives emanating out from the Beltway closed circuit on Iran, this alternative discussion – and Putin’s careful framing of it – is ‘out there’, widely dissected in much of the world. But it will not be heard in Washington. Biden in his Munich presentation, painted Russia as some sort of voodoo figure, uttering incantations damaging to the U.S. It was intended to imply that any person criticising America along similar lines, must therefore be a Russian agent – a traitor. Russia has become the voodoo doll [Link to Blumenthal’s Reuter’s scoop at original] to be held aloft, to frighten the American public, and to discipline public discourse.”
And all this leads to what at first seems nonsensical–but:
“How is it, with Iran at the very cusp, like Russia, of a possible de-coupling from Europe, that reactivating the JCPOA has drawn some unexpected advocates [Link at Original] – current and former top Israeli security officials wanting to pull Iran back into the JCPOA….
“Is this the ultimate paradox? At the very moment when Iranian scepticism threatens to prevail, Israeli scepticism should wane? Maybe they will walk past each other, without meeting, and nothing will result.”
Perhaps over the past several years, the genuine reality of Occupied Palestine’s pickle finally dawned on its military, but not its politicians–yet:
“Or, maybe it is about the ‘dark secret’ that no one wants to discuss publicly – namely, that Israel has been out-foxed. Whilst all the world has been obsessing about the ‘Big One’ (the nuclear weapon prospect), and whether or not, Trump’s max-pressure would induce compliance with JCPOA, Iran has been preparing – not the Big One – but lots and lots of ‘Little Ones’.” [All Emphasis Mine]
As usual with Crooke, there are several facets that need further looking into but perhaps the most critical is the fact that Imperial Planners and their Neoliberal Parasite allies now believe their own propaganda and can no longer see reality for what it is or are able to listen to other views. As Giraldi wrote last week, the Outlaw US Empire is moving “inexorably towards a totalitarian state intolerant of dissent.” And that intolerance extends to basic truth-telling as with Psaki’s daily remarks and NY Times “reporting” as b and others continuously document.
Perhaps the #1 thing the Outlaw Empire refuses to grasp is their complete, utter loss of Russia, China, and likeminded nations; that the Zero-sum game is now at a dead-end as ever more players dropout and join Win-Win. That the “stagnant waters” it’s produced are now up to its knees and quickly deepening, and that only by reversing course can it save itself. Oedipus knew he was always correct until he realized that he was oh so very wrong, but mere self-flagellation won’t cure today’s problems as they go well beyond the individual.
Posted by: karlof1 | Mar 1 2021 22:57 utc | 126
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