Wednesday, October 12, 2022

Alliance for Global Justice:

“ 'We Want to Live in Peace!' The Speech of Honduran President Xiomara Castro before the United Nations. In 2009 a US backed military coup in Honduras shocked the region, sparking massive national and international outcry which demanded restoration of the democratic order. Nicaragua’s solidarity with the people of Honduras was clear and decisive. In support of international attempts to reverse the coup, United Nations General Assembly President Miguel D’Escoto (formerly Nicaraguan Foreign Minister) accompanied President Manuel Zelaya to Honduras days after he was illegally ousted. The Honduran military blocked their plane from landing and fired on the crowds that had gathered at the airport to receive them. Nicaragua’s solidarity continued throughout the 13-year crisis that ensued.


On September 20, 2022, Honduran President Xiomara Castro addressed the 77th session of the United Nations General Assembly, speaking truth to power and establishing historical memory about the devastating impact of the 2009 US-backed coup, a coup that was finally reversed thanks to the courageous resistance of the Honduran people and international solidarity.


'Not only am I the first woman to have the honor of leading our Central American nation, but I also represent the first democratically elected government after going through 13 years of dictatorship, the 2009 coup d’état, full of cruel assassinations and death squads, two separate electoral frauds, a pandemic and two hurricanes. It is impossible to understand Hondurans and the great caravans of migrants without recognizing this context of cruel suffering that we have had to go through. ...

Thirteen years of a dictatorship, protected by the international community, led the country to multiply by six its public debt and reach a poverty rate of 74 percent, the highest rate in the history of Honduras.'  - Honduran President Xiomara Castro

https://afgj.org/nicanotes-10-06-2022


-->Another shameful US coup against an elected president, this time in Honduras. But our media doesn't have the stomach to remind people of the Democratic Party's  imperialism in Central America, masterminded by that Cold Warrior, Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State at the time.


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Jacobin:

"US officials are talking about responding to any future Russian nuclear attack on Ukraine with a conventional or even nuclear strike on Russia. What would that actually mean?


ANATOL LIEVEN

It would mean the end of civilization. As innumerable studies have shown, it would be exceptionally difficult in those circumstances to avoid escalation to total nuclear war. Even if we managed to avoid that, if the United States fired a nuclear missile into Russia, without any question whatsoever, Russia would send a missile into America. It depends on the scale of the missile and so forth, but even one missile would cause at minimum hundreds of thousands of American dead, more civilian dead than have ever died in the whole of US history. But as I say, it’s more likely at that point there would be full-scale nuclear exchange, and that would be the end of the world. Humanity as such would survive in extremely poor shape. America, Russia, Europe would not.


Incidentally, the argument here that this is necessary because it’s up to the Ukrainians — at this point, what is the first country that would be completely destroyed? Has anyone thought of asking ordinary Ukrainians if that is a price they think worth paying? Not now to defend the existence of Ukraine and Ukrainian independence, because at this point those have been secured, by Ukrainian victories with Western support. What we are talking about now is pretty typical postcolonial battles over limited amounts of territory in eastern and southern Ukraine. Anyone who thinks it’s worth risking potentially billions of lives — and people, by the way, all over the world, have never been asked for their opinion on this — has lost touch with certain elements of basic reality and sanity but also certain aspects of basic morality.

https://jacobin.com/2022/10/ukraine-russia-us-nuclear-war-putin?mc_cid=9cfedf7864&mc_eid=487355f8cb


-->Harsh words about the end of the planet, and possibly the end of our species. But the US media is just too preoccupied with the New Cold War to describe what World War III would really be like. In war, our media collapses into conformity with anything the Pentagon writes into the news cycle. 


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Common Dreams:

"Several seemingly disparate events in the past week come together to once again demonstrate the use of raw power by Israel and its supporters to force silence about their oppression of Palestinians from the river to the sea. 


The first of these events was the travel website, Booking.com caving in to massive Israeli pressure to rescind a travel warning they were intending to place on Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Next, The Hill terminated their association with a presenter, Katie Halper, for attempting to air a monologue which defended Rep. Rashida Tlaib and made the self-evident case that Israel is an apartheid state. Finally, a small group of on-campus clubs at the UC Berkeley School of Law came under intense fire, complete with bogus charges of antisemitism, for their decision to adopt bylaws that support BDS and bar the appearance of 'Zionist speakers' at their clubs' events. 


Looking at each of these incidents and then putting them together, it becomes evident that the growing awareness of the apartheid nature of the Israeli regime is leading the Israeli propaganda machine to double down on draconian tactics that endanger the principle of free speech and even public safety. They're doing it because the facts, which have never been on their side, are becoming more widely understood, so they have no other tactics to turn to."

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/10/05/draconian-silencing-those-who-call-out-israeli-apartheid


-->The NYT doesn't talk about Israel's raw power and draconian tactics. Our supposed "newspaper of record" will go down in history as a key supporter of Israeli apartheid.