Truth Tellers, New Rebels

In times like ours, when the brutality and viciousness of a particular regime is staring us the in the face and no longer masquerading behind a false sense of grace and morality, men of true intelligence and courage do not recede, instead they continue their unrelenting work as watchers, reminders, and educators. Some will undeniably draw back and become hesitant to voice their real convictions in fear of political repression, or even worse consequences. I don't know how trying our times will be for journalists, reporters and yes, bloggers, but I am sure they will need our unflinching support, to the last drop of what we can muster in our little corner of the world. We must support the new rebels of our day, whether through donations, subscribing to their publications, or buying their books; by whatever means, we must help the ones who are principled and uninfluenced by power and flattery. TomDispatch, Truthdig, Counterpunch, Democracy Now, The Real News, Anitwar, these sites are indispensable to the understanding of the current crisis of faith and truth in almost all of the world issues/conflicts today. Journalists and commentators like Glenn Greenwald, Chris Hedges, Nir Rosen, Chris Floyd, Robert Fisk, Tariq Ali, Justin Raimondo, Jeremy Scahill, Seymour Hersh, Amy Goodman, these men and women and others I've either forgot to mention or I'm unaware of, exuberate courage and possess a strong mindnesses to accept and tell the truth. In an hour of crisis, they are not the type to squander the oppourtunity to educate and enlighten the public. Their work, across broad fields, will give us the ammo to fight against the torturers, liars, and thieves who are conducting a war on Middle Eastern civlization, from Iraq to Palestine.

The recent Gaza assault has opened a vein for a new direct and hostile commentary towards Israel and its policies in the region. The time has come to garner our rights and be hostile to violence, lies, and thievery. Chuck D, Hip Hop's rebel, pronounced "I have a right to be hostile." And how right he was.

Below is a broad spectrum of the commentary on the Israeli-Palestinian war by some of the journalists and commentators I previously mentioned.

Glenn Greenwald, writes in his piece entitled George Washington's warnings and U.S. policy towards Israel:

When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute -- like most intractable, bloody, hate-driven, decades-long wars -- there is endless blame to go around to countless parties. Commentary which fails to recognize that, or, worse, which insists it's not true, is almost certainly the by-product of this blind self-regard.

Uncritical support for someone's destructive behavior isn't "friendship"; it is, as Washington said, slavishness, and it does no good either for the party lending the blind support nor the party receiving it. It's hard to overstate the good that would be achieved if the U.S. simply adhered to those basic and self-evidently compelling principles of George Washington, who actually knew a thing or two about the perils of war.

He finishes his commentary by acknowleding one of the more revealing and encouraging facts in all of this:

The lockstep, uncritical support for everything Israel does in the political class is completely unrepresentative of American public opinion.

Chris Hedges's newest column, a sort-of continuation of his previous column "Israel's Crime Against Humanity," is called Party to Murder. Here is a brief excerpt that appears at the end:

The Israelis in Gaza, like the American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, are foolishly breeding the next generation of militants and Islamic radicals. Jihadists, enraged by the injustices done by Israel and the United States, seek to carry out reciprocal acts of savagery, even at the cost of their own lives. The violence unleashed on Palestinian children will, one day, be the violence unleashed on Israeli children. This is the tragedy of Gaza. This is the tragedy of Israel.

And then there is Nir Rosen and his scathing attack on the whole war on terrorism. Rosen explains how the word 'terrorism' is used by political powers to repress and inhibit political expression by people who have less power. The article is Gaza: the logic of colonial power

Terrorism is a normative term and not a descriptive concept. An empty word that means everything and nothing, it is used to describe what the Other does, not what we do. The powerful – whether Israel, America, Russia or China – will always describe their victims' struggle as terrorism, but the destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – with the tens of thousands of civilians it has killed … these will never earn the title of terrorism, though civilians were the target and terrorising them was the purpose.

A Zionist Israel is not a viable long-term project and Israeli settlements, land expropriation and separation barriers have long since made a two state solution impossible. There can be only one state in historic Palestine. In coming decades, Israelis will be confronted with two options. Will they peacefully transition towards an equal society, where Palestinians are given the same rights, à la post-apartheid South Africa? Or will they continue to view democracy as a threat? If so, one of the peoples will be forced to leave. Colonialism has only worked when most of the natives have been exterminated. But often, as in occupied Algeria, it is the settlers who flee. Eventually, the Palestinians will not be willing to compromise and seek one state for both people. Does the world want to further radicalise them?

One of my favourite writers is Chris Floyd, he is stunningly accurate on almost all the major stories, and on both foreign and domestic issues. Floyd, in his new piece Voiceless in Gaza: Israeli Carnage and the American Courtiers confronts, with unmatched precision, the silence in the American political class and media:

Everyone knows that the United States government is the only force that could rein in the virulent militarism of the Israeli state, which is now reaching literally genocidal proportions. But there is no faction in American politics that has the courage, the will -- or the desire -- to offer even the most tepid criticisms of Israeli policy.

Perhaps no one is more qualified to speak on the Gaza asault and its roots than Robert Fisk, long-time correspondent for The Independent, and the most truthful journalist there is. He is Britain's Sey Hersh. Or maybe, its the other way around. In his new article Leaders Lie, Civilians Die, and Lessons of History Are Ignored Fisk documents the hopelessness and senselessness of the whole bloody war. It's a cycle of violence, and its a cylce both Hamas and the Israeli establishment feed on to stay alive. Here is a passage from Fisk's piece:

We hear the usual Israeli line. General Yaakov Amidror, the former head of the Israeli army’s “research and assessment division” announced that “no country in the world would allow its citizens to be made the target of rocket attacks without taking vigorous steps to defend them”. Quite so. But when the IRA were firing mortars over the border into Northern Ireland, when their guerrillas were crossing from the Republic to attack police stations and Protestants, did Britain unleash the RAF on the Irish Republic? Did the RAF bomb churches and tankers and police stations and zap 300 civilians to teach the Irish a lesson? No, it did not. Because the world would have seen it as criminal behaviour. We didn’t want to lower ourselves to the IRA’s level.

Tariq Ali agrees with Nir Rosen and many others that a one-state solution is the only viable solution, and that solution is becoming inevitable every day. He writes in the Guardian:

The test for Hamas is not whether it can be house-trained to the satisfaction of western opinion, but whether it can break with this crippling tradition. Soon after the Hamas election victory in Gaza, I was asked in public by a Palestinian what I would do in their place. "Dissolve the Palestinian Authority" was my response and end the make-believe. To do so would situate the Palestinian national cause on its proper basis, with the demand that the country and its resources be divided equitably, in proportion to two populations that are equal in size ñ not 80% to one and 20% to the other, a dispossession of such iniquity that no self-respecting people will ever submit to it in the long run. The only acceptable alternative is a single state for Jews and Palestinians alike, in which the exactions of Zionism are repaired. There is no other way.

The whole piece is a worthy read.

It's hard to pick a favorite of the many articles on Israel-Palestine that has sprouted in the wake of the recent assault on Gaza. But I'm not one to hold all of them up on the same plateau. Some commentaries are entirely different in their conception and approach and because of that they deserve wider acclaim. Justin Raimondo's recent piece called Israel's Constant Crisis is one of those necessary reads. Below is a long section from the piece:

From the day of its birth, Israel has been a Western project, a unique creation of European ideologues whose vision of a Jewish state was rooted in myth, custom, and remembrance, rather than blood and soil. Israel owes its existence to theology rather than geography, and in this it occupies a singular place in the history of nations. The only other comparable state is, or was, the old Soviet Union, which was founded as the receptacle for Leninist ideology, but even here the analogy isn't quite exact, for the simple reason that Russia preexisted the USSR by several centuries, and Russian nationalism soon came to dominate and overwhelm the ostensibly "internationalist" Kremlin leadership.

As a settler colony rather than a rooted nation, Israel's always precarious existence is made possible by an extensive international support system that exists entirely outside the Middle East. In the beginning, it was the Zionist movement itself that provided the outside material aid that nurtured and grew this nascent nation. That, however, was not enough to provide the sustenance Israel needed to come into existence and survive in a very rough neighborhood, so it was the British empire that presided over its birth. The Balfour Declaration provided the semi-legal basis for the existence of an independent Jewish state in the area known as Palestine.

The British, however, had neither the resources nor the inclination to act as Israel's permanent sponsor and protector, and this role eventually fell to the United States. Without U.S. aid, including unconditional military and political support, Israel could not exist for long. Over the years, it has evolved its own characteristic means of survival, which is analogous to that of an epiphyte – a plant that, rather than rooting in its own soil, grows on other plants.

Because Israel is almost entirely dependent on international support – and especially American support – for its very survival, without U.S. public opinion behind it the Jewish state would soon wither on the vine. What this means, in practice, is that a constant stream of pro-Israel propaganda must be directed at the American people in order to justify the high levels of financial and military aid that keep Israel afloat. What's more, the Israelis must constantly generate the urgency and immediacy of the need to support their country. They have succeeded in doing this by projecting a sense of continuing crisis. The idea that Israel is in danger, that unless we ship billions more in taxpayer dollars the Israeli state will sink beneath the waves of an unrelenting Arab assault, is constantly being pushed – and we wonder why the "peace process" is perpetually stalled.

If it wasn't for these writers my knowledge of the present crisis would be inadequate and my observations, shallow. They come from various backgrounds, write from a wide variety of experiences. Some come from an academic field, others a battlefield, but they all reach, in one way or another, the same truth about the annihilation in Gaza. What is happening there, at the present moment, is not a cause for celebration. Let's hope there won't be any fireworks there tonight.

Happy New Year

What is ahead, waiting for us, in 2009?

Here's an article by Glen Allport, "The Year Ahead: 2009."

"These are disturbing times, even frightening times, for anyone who favors love and freedom."

War. War. War.

Believe it or not, but some people get off on war. And they're not all wearing uniform, puffing on cigars and sitting behind desks drawing war plans. They're average human beings, you know, the 'Joe Plumbers' of the world, and this holiday season Santa gave them what they wished for; war, war, and more war. They're whores for wars. They'll sit on Santa's lap and anyone else's lap who will give them war. Some people think its fantastic. And where are these people? In the churches, the mosques, the government halls, the media channels.

Anyways, I read an article today and the reality of the entire war is beginning to hit me. All of my life I've read and heard predictions about all out war in the Middle East and every single day those predictions are coming true. It's inevitable. A mass tragedy playing out before our eyes. The whole region. And for what? State hegemony? The whole world is a big game for the elite, the real policy makers. The Middle East is a chess piece to them. And what good does a protest ever do? That's a mass jerk-off. I'll never ever attend one. It's degrading as hell. If people are serious, then serious action needs to be taken. Here is a passage from the article that pissed me off today.

There are many, many injustices and tragedies underway in our world, which cry out for immediate attention, and no one can really rank them as to deserving more or less help. Nevertheless, many currents of history have been distilled into what we see today as the war against the Palestinians, and it is keenly observed throughout the world. For this reason, we could say that the fate of the Palestinians is the measure of the world's conscience, and will mark our level of civilization in the pages of time.

The piece is called "The War Against Palestine" and its written by George Salzman and Manuel Garcia Jr.

Also, an article by Justin Raimondo, he puts everything into perspective. Its called "The Politics of the Gaza Massacre."


(photo by Mr. Fish from truthdig)

And No Balls.

Joshua Frank's article on Obama and the recent Gaza massacre. It's called 'No Comment and No Leadership From Obama'

Rice: "My business is to lay a foundation for history's judgment."

Who the fuck do these people think they are?

America is run by people who think they can predict the future because of their fleeting influence in the present. These men make decisions by hugging their magic 8 balls, and probably look up at the stars constellations before invading a country. Rove is confident that history will come around to Bush's policies and place him in high standing. And Rice is going around preaching her honorable work and what it means for the 21st century world.

"It's not a popularity contest," Rice argued. "It is to lay a foundation for where all this will come out. I know that your business is to report today's headlines and I respect that. But my business is to lay a foundation for history's judgment."

Read the rest here.

Rice, Rove, Cheney, are these guys just covering their asses by making these statements? Or are they true believers? Do they still passionately believe in what they have done? And do they honestly think historical perspective is on their side? Maybe a few shoes are in order. Do these guys honestly think 10 years from now they will come out of hiding and be greeted as liberators? Do they feel misunderstood in today's America? These people act like whiny teenagers living in a world where nobody listens to them. What a bunch of immature brats.

Let The Blood Run...

There is outrage in Jordan, Egypt, and all across the Middle East to the recent attack on Gaza by the Israeli government. There is even outrage in Paris, London, and Madrid and the rest of the world. But in the country where protests may count, America, there is no outrage or any outpouring of anger over Israeli's actions. Thousands can march in the streets of Assiut and it will not make a difference in the Israel-Palestine occupation/genocide/war/fuckstorm. The only people who can make a difference are the American people and they are unaware of the urgency to act.

The American people's basic response is "Let the blood run." "The conflict has nothing to do with us." "It goes back a thousand of years between those people, what can we do?" When I refer to the American people I don't include the enlightened few. But for the enlightened few: when will it be the appropriate time to make our voices heard? Do people realize our government's, and by extension, our role in all of this? If people want to take democracy seriously, we better start now. These type of events open spaces for dissent. If AIPAC can have an influence in our government, I don't see why we can't. Let's get organized, quick.

The gravity of Israeli's act is so paralyzing to my conciousness that I haven't been able to find the words to voice my frustration and outrage. It's been two days since the Israeli airstrike that killed over 300 people and just thinking about is sheer terror. The attack, of course, is nothing in new in America and Israel's playbook in the Middle East, but for the first time in a long time the whole world just recieved another shock. When and how will this end? Will Israeli justify nuking parts of the Arab world? If this airstrike can be justified, that can also be justified. It's not a big leap. We need to protest, scream, and tear our hairs out now before it gets to that point. And if people don't think the Middle East is inching closer every year to a nuclear holocaust, then open your eyes. Open them. Now.

I haven't begun thinking, and writing about this. I don't know how to approach it. There is sixty years of history and I don't know where to start. For now, I'm reading Chris Floyd's commentary, you can read it here.

Quote of the Week

"Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion." ~ Oscar Wilde

Quote of the Week

"We must all face the fact that our leaders are certifiably insane, or worse." ~ William S. Burroughs

Quote of the Week

"When a stupid man is always doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty." ~ George Bernard Shaw

Quote of the Week

"The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the greatest liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth." ~ H. L. Mencken

Won't you like to punch this guy in the face?

His name is Stephen "most annoying weasel in the world" Leeb.

Have you bought a wheelbarrow yet?

Writing on the recent financial scandal, the Bernie Madoff $50 billion Ponzi-scheme, Alexander Cockburn had this to say:

The operating assumption of the Ponzi scheme is that the tide will always rise, that old investors can be repaid by the infusions ponied up by the fresh recruits. For the past twenty years the entire American economy has become—to quote Bernie’s succinct résumé of his business to his sons —“a giant Ponzi scheme,”.

Uncle Sam is the biggest Ponzi operator of all, with the added magical power denied Madoff (unless forgery was among his talents) of being able to print money at will. CounterPunch tip of the week. Wheelbarrow stocks. Buy ‘em while the price is right. Soon Americans will be needing wheelbarrows to put the money in to go shopping. A vast new wheelbarrow industry could be part of Obama’s recovery plan. Collapsible wheelbarrows for the soccer moms to get in the back of the Volvo. Electric-powered wheelbarrows. Hybrid wheelbarrows from GM. Gold-plated wheelbarrows from the Defense sector.

Do as the man says and buy a fine, well-made wheelbarrow in preparation for the collapse of the final financial pyramid, the U.S Economy.

Here are some suggestions:

For you green-minded, environmentally-friendly, ahead-of-your-fucking-time visionaries; The electric wheelbarrow:




For those of you who put convenience above everything else:


And finally, for those of you who like to go big:

The Shoe is Mightier Than The Word

Who knew a shoe thrown from a dispossessed journalist would ignite such fiery reactions across the world? It was such a defining act. Any future commentary on the Bush presidency cannot live up to it. People will not remember the constitutional and eloquent criticisms made by journalists and commentators, they will, however, always remember that an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at Bush. So much for the pen.

Let a lesson be learned: When a public official(and by extension, the government he stands in for) commits unbearable and atrocious deeds such as starting a war on a whole civilization, civilized commentary and criticism can no longer express the deep resentment and grievances of the people. Barbarous acts demand barbarous acts. A journalist must put down his pen, and pick up his shoe and hurl it as his hard as he can at the public unofficial criminal.

May the shoe deface all corrupt and depraved leaders!

The Iraqi journalist, Muntadar al-Zeidi, is now hailed as a hero throughout the Middle East. Antiwar editor Justin Raimondo documents the rising popularity of al-Zeidi in his piece Muntadar al-Zeidi: Hero, Martyr, Symbol of Resistance. Below is a brief excerpt:

"This is a farewell kiss," al-Zeidi cried out, as he hurled his footwear at the presidential noggin, "you dog!" What struck a nerve, throughout the world, not just the Middle East, was the sight of an ordinary person who somehow got to express his opinion of the most powerful human being on the planet in a way that not only garnered attention, but also underscored the sense of powerlessness and frustration felt by Americans and Iraqis when it comes to this seemingly endless occupation.

I agree with Raimondo's sentiments about the incident symbolizing an act of defiance against the barbaric war. Acts of defiance are seldom seen in the world today. There are no marches, no protests, no screaming in the West. This was the first major outbreak of resistance within Iraq in a long time that many Americans got to see. We saw Iraqis stamping their shoes on Saddam the statue in the beginning of the war, and today we see Iraqis hurling their shoes at Bush the man. But will people get the underlining message? Al-Zeidi's shoe may have been a farewell kiss to Bush, but when will the other shoe, the one signifying the farewell kiss to the war, drop? They may be shoe-bombs if America does not pull out quickly. But back in America, will we laugh this incident off as another joke on Bush? Isn't the joke really on us? Bush laughed it off because he knows he will walk off into the sunset in his cowboy shoes. For the rest of us, however, will we be so lucky?

Robert Scheer is also tackling the issue in his piece, President Bush and the Flying Shoes: A Cautionary Tale, saying the Iraqi journalist' words "will stand as the enduring epitaph in the region on Bush’s folly, which is the reality of his claimed legacy of success in the war on terror." But the incident is much more than a epitaph, it indeed is a warning to America's future president, as Scheer says below:

This invasion, according to then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, was supposed to be financed by Iraqi oil money, but instead has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $1 trillion. The results, as the Times’ account of the report put it, are abysmal: “The hard figures on basic services and industrial production compiled for the report reveal that for all the money spent and promises made, the rebuilding effort never did much more than restore what was destroyed during the invasion and the convulsive looting that followed.”

No wonder then that we are perceived as blundering bullies by so many in the region that we claimed to be interested in modernizing. That an Iraqi journalist, whose family had been victimized by Saddam Hussein and who was kidnapped by insurgents while attempting to work as a TV reporter, came to so loathe the American president, as does much of the world, should serve as the final grade on the Bush administration. It should also serve as a caution to President-elect Barack Obama as he seeks to triangulate withdrawal from Iraq with an escalation of the far more treacherous attempt to conquer Afghanistan.

The reason why I am so fascinated by the defiant act, is that for the first time a spectator became an actor in the unfolding tragedy that is the Bush drama. A journalist, whose job is to sit and write and copy the presidents' words chose to put down his pen, pick up his shoe and make his anger known to the rest of the world. And the rest of the world laughed in agreement. A new game has been created on the internet where you get the highest score for hitting the president the most. This is what the American presidency has come to: the main target in a shoe-throwing game. But even beyond the act's hilarity, it has a certain poetic intensity to it. The poetical epitaph "this is the farewell kiss, you dog” yelled by al-Zeidi followed by his touching remarks "This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq,” gave the act a dramatic fury. It wasn't just some guy throwing a shoe. He made a point, and he made it well. And the point was made with intense screaming coming from al-Zeidi that accompanied his descent into the heap of reporters surrounding him. Not suprisingly, the act has spawned other acts. Across Iraqi cities, people have poured to the streets with shoes on their hands, while al-Zeidi is being 'embedded' in prison, waiting to be freed. Can history get any more poetic? E. Douka Kabitoglou in his book "Plato and the English Romantics" writes about the importance of the 'poetic moment.'

The 'poetic' moment transforms the histoical perspective, the drama of existence, by looking upon the world of suffering from the viewpoint of the 'observing' audience, not form the standpoint of interacting characters.(p.361)

Al-Zeidi, being part of the 'observing audience' chose to strip down the role of a 'spectator' and become an 'actor' - and transform the historical perspective. Like the hanging of Saddam, the 'shoeing' of Bush is demanding a whole new perspective on just how unpopular he is. Perhaps he is the most unpopular man in the world. Kabitoglou writes in a latter passage that "in an exact sense, the only thing that can be 'studied' in life is the 'moment.' Any history of the Bush presidency, I'm sure, will entail the shoe-throwing moment.


On another note, Raed Jarrar has recently created a petition demading the release of al-Zeidi who has been beaten in custody, as reported by The Guardian. Jarrar will deliver the petition to the Iraqi embassy next week. It has been signed by Noam Chomsky and a thousand others. Sign it now.


Here is the video of the 'poetic moment.'

A No-State Solution?

Chris Hedges, in his most recent piece, Israel’s ‘Crime Against Humanity', writes quite poignantly about the engrossing tragedy surrouding Israel's and Palestine's future. The bulk of the piece is important but I first want to draw you to the last words:

The Israelis in Gaza, like the American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, are foolishly breeding the next generation of militants and Islamic radicals. Jihadists, enraged by the injustices done by Israel and the United States, seek to carry out reciprocal acts of savagery, even at the cost of their own lives. The violence unleashed on Palestinian children will, one day, be the violence unleashed on Israeli children. This is the tragedy of Gaza. This is the tragedy of Israel.

Hedges interviewed the new UN Special Rapporteur for human rights in the Palestinian territories, Richard Falk, who is a former law professor from Princeton University.

The U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, former Princeton University law professor Richard Falk, calls what Israel is doing to the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza “a crime against humanity.” Falk, who is Jewish, has condemned the collective punishment of the Palestinians in Gaza as “a flagrant and massive violation of international humanitarian law as laid down in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.” He has asked for “the International Criminal Court to investigate the situation, and determine whether the Israeli civilian leaders and military commanders responsible for the Gaza siege should be indicted and prosecuted for violations of international criminal law.”

Falk, who supports further investigation into the September 11 attacks, also had this to say:

“It is macabre,” Falk said. “I don’t know of anything that exactly fits this situation. People have been referring to the Warsaw ghetto as the nearest analog in modern times.”

“There is no structure of an occupation that endured for decades and involved this kind of oppressive circumstances,” the rapporteur added. “The magnitude, the deliberateness, the violations of international humanitarian law, the impact on the health, lives and survival and the overall conditions warrant the characterization of a crime against humanity. This occupation is the direct intention by the Israeli military and civilian authorities. They are responsible and should be held accountable.”

It is definitely encouraging that there are courageous Western intellectuals like Falk around making noise in the international community about Israel-Palestine, and asking questions about the 9/11 attacks.

William Pfaff, writing in his December 11 column, The Mutual Suicide Pact of Israelis and Palestinians, also cites Falk and his case that the collective seige of Palestine by Israel is a crime against humanity. Falk proposes that the Internatinoal Criminal Court should begin investigations. Pfaff warns at the end of his column that conflict over settlement of Palestinian land between extremist settlers, backed by religious fanatics, and any elected Israeli government "would threaten the moral substance of Israel and its future itself."

No state that continues to expand on blood and soil can do so forever. Unless your America and its your manifest destiny. But even the future of America is at risk. The financial bankruptcy of the American federal government is not far away. Whether it's moral or financial bankruptcy, both Israel and America are collapsing under their own weight. In the founding of both countries a fervorous mythology based on expansion and that was deeply religious emerged. It has grown ever more powerful in the preceding decades. The 'apocalypse' that religious fanatics in both countries imagine may will be the climax for both states and their supposed indestructible statehood. An American federal government, we know, cannot forever trample the desires of its people, and in a increasingly defranchised country the federal government will no longer be responsive to new emergencies and disasters. Smaller city-level states will be responsible to provide help and support, thereby making the federal state obsolete and even detrimental to the future's country prosperity. Israel's fate is not written in the same way, but its actions too are leading to a similar collapse. Its extremist settlers are heading on a death march as they approach closer each day to an unsettling conclusion. No state that continually strives to block genuine cries for freedom and diverts them underground can exist forever without punishment. As Hedges writes:

Israel seeks to break the will of the Palestinians to resist. The Israeli government has demonstrated little interest in diplomacy or a peaceful solution. The rapid expansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank is an effort to thwart the possibility of a two-state solution by gobbling up vast tracts of Palestinian real estate.

He is echoed by Falk:

“Israel, all along, has not been prepared to enter into diplomatic process that gives the Palestinians a viable state,” Falk said. “They [the Israelis] feel time is on their side. They feel they can create enough facts on the ground so people will come to the conclusion a viable state cannot emerge.”

I will write in much more depth and clarity about Israel-Palestine and America's involvement in the coming months and years. Hopefully, I will write with more knowledge and familiarity. But forgive me, I'm not yet 20 and only beginning to fight for the cause of freedom. As for now, go and read the full columns by Pfaff here and by Hedges here

The Matrix Revolutions

The shoe drop heard 'round the world.

How Hip Hop is Done

Revolution? Yes. We. Can.

German economist Jörg Guido Hülsmann brilliantly defaces the arguments for inflation and makes the case for deflation in his essay "Deflation and Liberty" which is essential reading. The passages below are my favourite parts.

Paper money has produced several great crises, each of which turned out to be more severe than the preceding one. Moreover, paper money has completely transformed the financial structure of the western economies. At the beginning of the 20th century, most firms and industrial corporations were financed out of their revenues, and banks and other financial intermediaries played only a subordinate role. Today, the picture has been reversed, and the most fundamental reason for this reversal is paper money. Paper money has caused an unprecedented increase of debt on all levels: government, corporate, and individual. It has financed the growth of the state on all levels, federal, state, and local. It thus has become the technical foundation for the totalitarian menace of our day.

On free money.

What kind of money would prevail in a free society? Theoretical considerations and historical experience all point to the same answer: a free society would use precious metals as money. Payments would be made in coins made out of gold, silver, platinum, copper, or whatever other substance would combine scarcity with the physical advantages of these metals.

By contrast, paper money has always been fiat money, that is, it has always been imposed by the coercive power of the state. It is not the money of the free market but the money of a partially enslaved society.

Why the powerful stay powerful.

Inflation is an unjustifiable redistribution of income in favor of those who receive the new money and money titles first, and to the detriment of those who receive them last. In practice the redistribution always works out in favor of the fiat-money producers themselves (whom we misleadingly call central banks) and of their partners in the banking sector and at the stock exchange. And of course inflation works out to the advantage of governments and their closest allies in the business world. Inflation is the vehicle through which these individuals and groups enrich themselves, unjustifiably, at the expense of the citizenry at large. If there is any truth to the socialist caricature of capitalism—an economic system that exploits the poor to the benefit of the rich—then this caricature holds true for a capitalist system strangulated by inflation. The relentless influx of paper money makes the wealthy and powerful richer and more powerful than they would be if they depended exclusively on the voluntary support of their fellow citizens. And because it shields the political and economic establishment of the country from the competition emanating from the rest of society, inflation puts a brake on social mobility. The rich stay rich (longer) and the poor stay poor (longer) than they would in a free society.

The follies of inflation.

The Japanese governments of the 1990s sought to fix the economic crisis through increasingly heavy doses of inflation. But the only result of this policy was to give a zombie life to the hopelessly bureaucratic and bankrupt conglomerates that control Japanese industry, banking, and politics. After almost fifteen years of mindless inflation, Japan's economic crisis has turned into a fundamental political crisis that sooner or later will bring the country to the verge of revolution.

This is also what will happen to the West, if citizens let their governments have a free hand in monetary affairs.

And when is that revolution that Hülsmann is talking about coming?

Gerald Celente says in the next few years.

If you're looking for a bigger boot to your ass, check out the video below, made by none other than Avaroth.

The Greatest American Alive

At 73, Ron Paul with his aged-wisdom is leading the revolution. He is young at heart and joyful in spirit. May he be a light onto America and the rest of the world for many years to come.