Ghassan Kanafani

Ghassan Fayiz Kanafani was a prominent Palestinian author and militant, considered to be a leading novelist of his generation and one of the Arab world's leading writers. Kanafani's works have been translated into more than 17 languages.(...) In 1972, while he was in Beirut, Kanafani and his 17-year-old niece Lamees were killed by a bomb planted in his car by the Mossad,

Lebanese Professor As'ad Abu Khalil* speaks of him here...



* I owe a good deal to the intellect of Prof. abu Khalil, whose uncompromising thoughts I have followed for decades on his blog. Although I've never met him in person, I sought and benefitted from his advice. I hope to thank him in person sometime before I pass from this life.

Anti-Colonialism's Unfinished Business

Americans are starting to wake up to reality, as a foreign observer put it:

Western liberal democracies are like a narcissistic wife beater who postures as a sensitive he/him feminist on social media. Like a pop star who makes a show of fighting the power and defending the marginalized while supporting Israel. Our society isn’t what it pretends to be. Our entire civilization sustains itself through an endless river of blood, sweat and tears from the global south while making movies about fighting for justice and saving the world. Our pundits wag their fingers at the “tyrannical regimes” in empire-targeted nations while our own rulers murder, starve and terrorize disobedient populations in order to dominate the planet. In school they teach us that we are lucky to live in a free society where the people command the government with their votes and we have the right to express ourselves in whatever way we choose, when in reality wealthy oligarchs control the entire electoral process and our expression is aggressively manipulated through a complex system of censorship and propaganda. We have no integrity.

How long has this been going on? For that, we might take an historical perspective beginning with the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, which oversaw the infamous Scramble for Africa:

Yet in a very real sense Africa is a prime cause of this terrible overturning of civilization which we have lived to see; and these words seek to show how in the Dark Continent are hidden the roots, not simply of war today but of the menace of wars tomorrow.

Still can't join the dots? Then listen to Prof. Richard Wolff lay it all out in a succinct summary:



Now we get to the purpose of this post, Anti-colonialism's Unfinished Business. It seems as if the Unfinished Business has finally made it onto the agenda:



And for an oncore, don't miss THIS.

An Historic Inflection Point

Just twelve days ago I posted that "Iran is making history". Although many of us somehow intuited that our world was on the cusp of momentous changes, we probably didn't realize (at the time) just how earth-shattering they would be, once the dust cleared. The pace of activity picked up (I won't detail it here since there are a plethora of analyses by capable authors one can reference), and just one week after my post, Peter Haenseler via the blog of former CIA analyst Larry C. Johnson summarized the "state of affairs" in the following manner:

No one expected Donald Trump to sign the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)—especially in Versailles. Iran is taking its place at the big table with the major powers, and the world looks different—we’re asking questions—many of which have no answers.

Although the dust hadn't (and still hasn't) settled, the immediate question on everybody's lips was:

What drove Trump to hurriedly sign the MoU?

The President himself let slip the answer to that question during a masterful display of circumlocution at the following press conference. The answer makes its debut at 2:35😆:



Neither I nor Larry C. Johnson are oil industry specialists, but Larry has conveniently done his homework before I could begin researching the issue (more HERE, and a further update HERE). Coming to think of it, I should just refer you to Larry C. Johnson's blog since he has done a masterful job of following, researching and documenting this entire affair.

I will perhaps end with a segment from another Middle East analyst of the highest caliber, the incomparable Alastair Crooke. in which he quotes a former senior Israeli Iran military intelligence analyst:

An unquestioned dogma has bitten the dust:

“The long-standing expectation in parts of Jerusalem and Washington has been that sustained pressure could lead to regime change in Tehran … [However] the announced agreement suggests a [new] fundamental reality: The campaign that many hoped would weaken or even destabilise the Islamic Republic will instead conclude with the regime intact, strengthened, and formally engaged by the U.S. … [This] amounts to the collapse of a broader strategic assumption: that coordinated American and Israeli pressure could generate conditions conducive to fundamental political change inside Iran. Instead, the likely outcome is the opposite … [it is] an outcome likely to reinforce confidence amongst [Iran’s] ruling elite rather than weaken it …”.
This moment represents a major strategic achievement for Iran: A heroic image is surging across the globe – whereas Israel’s isolation on the Iran issue, even amongst its Gulf allies, has spiked. On the personal level, Netanyahu’s standing in Israel has plunged catastrophically.

Glory Be!

Iran is making history.



More from former analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, Larry C. Johnson.

This is where the stock markets stood yesterday. What will they be like today?

A "geopolitical" rant to Americans (who have been force-fed the Koolaide)

I'm not sure many Americans are aware how much their outlook concerning various geopolitical affairs (for those few that care about such things), is manufactured as a form of consent for the aims their secret government is pursuing at any given point in time. A salient (and recent) example of the effectiveness of this government policy is the following ...

I have my own political views on these things, but I have to laugh to myself as I observe events unfold during what has transpired of this decade. I think more Americans are unfortunately prone to drinking their government's Koolaide than not. They need to wake up.👀

Wokeness has become a "thing" these days. Interestingly, the term "woke" eschews immutability: A "dormant" person may become "woke", but equally a "woke" person may become "dormant". However, a more terminal "antithesis" to wokeness is "blindness".

This takes me to another related topic: American hubris is its own worst enemy:

The heads of Russia and Iran were both hopelessly (or so it may have seemed) Pro-Western at one time. Not any more!

It almost seems as though the following never happened:

The U.S. Consul General, Jack Gosnell, had a close relationship with Putin when he was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. The two of them worked closely to create joint ventures and other ways to promote relations between the two countries. Gosnell related that Putin was always straightforward, courteous and helpful.

As for Masoud Pezeshkian, his pro-Western leanings were never in doubt.

However, Western "soberbia" in dealing with both turned them into "Anti-Western" leaders, thereby roundly defeating any purpose or outcome the Western establishment may have sought through its collective foreign policy over the years. The immediate outcome of the recent clash between Israel and Iran was totally unexpected and portends uncertainty:

The destruction of Israel is in full swing. The reconstruction of partially destroyed Israel (Tel Aviv, ports, airports and arms factories) will take years, but requires that the ceasefire holds, which is completely uncertain as the protagonists are behaving so unreliably. This will result in the owners concerned not putting up any money in the current situation. Would you rebuild an office building if there was a 50% chance that it would be destroyed again tomorrow?

What will the future bring? And what kind of consent will be manufactured to justify it?

Dr Jan Oberg - The West is Militarising Itself to Death

Jan Oberg. Jan is a sociologist, peace researcher, the director of Transnational Foundation for Peace & Future Research.



I couldn't have said it better!

The World should be Ashamed

Blinne Ni Ghralaigh KC described the situation as a crisis or humanity, and the embodiment of hell. Violence, death, disease, no school, starvation - Gaza is becoming uninhabitable. For children there is nothing but the sound of war, day in, day out. Reports of torture and abuse of bodies more common. 4 out 5 people in the world in catastrophic hunger are in Gaza. The daily stats are clear proof: 247 deaths (including 48 mothers and 117 children, 3 medics, a UN worker, a journalist) Some are wounded over and over. Each day 3,900 homes destroyed, ambulances and hospitals are targeted. Bombs are dropped on places people have been told to evacuate to. There’s a new acronym – WCNSF – which stands for “Wounded Child, No Surviving Family”. There is imminent and irrevocable evidence of urgency. UN aid remains unimplemented. Humanitarian ceasefire calls have been ignored. Since the case was filed, over a thousand have been killed. Over 85% repeatedly forced to move, into shrinking slivers of land. This is a population that was already vulnerable after 16 years of blockade. Many dying from preventable problems. Children in particular subjected to mental torture, much of which is irreparable.

Many people have no access to food, water, medicine or safe shelter. A trapped population that has nowhere safe to go. In addition services are denied or restricted, even though even the US asked for it to be allowed.

Israel denies it is responsible for the crisis. 500 aid trucks were necessary daily before 7 October. Promises of future aid therefore hold little sway. UN SG has stressed that number of trucks doesn’t matter, because aid cannot be delivered effectively. Everyone and everything remains at imminent risk if irreparable prejudice.

The international community continues to fail the Palestinian people. The horror being live streamed, as victims broadcast their own destruction in real time. This has repercussions for generations to come. “The world should be ashamed”. Palestinian pastor on Xmas Day “this is a genocide, we will arise…but this is by far the biggest blow we have received”. South Africa is doing what it can, standing up to be counted.

Two videos to end the year...

If you do nothing more before the end of the year, do watch these two videos:




Oh!, ... and GO HOUTHIS!

We study history for a reason

Dedicated to Turdeau and Zelenskiy:

BRICS+ Onward Ever, Backward NEVER

I am glad to have lived long enough to witness this, even if it is in its early stages and the road ahead is long and treacherous. Here is a major marker to celebrate on that long road:


Find the above video HERE

The world has changed economically and geopolitically, and who better to provide the background than Pepe Escobar:



More on the BRICS Summit here:



...And here:



Key speeches at the BRICS Business Forum:



While undeniably positive overall, it is important to temper expectations:

To be clear, it’s a positive development that a broad range of countries will now participate in BRICS’ countless gatherings each year ahead of its annual summit, but the only thing that they all have in common is their interest in accelerating financial multipolarity processes via their national currencies. That’s not to downplay the importance of BRICS expanding in the way that was ultimately decided upon, but just to inform readers of its newfound limits in order to temper their expectations. At the same time, BRICS also has more opportunities than before in the sense that more countries can now participate in whatever alternative financial architecture their group unveils in the future such as an inclusive non-Western SWIFT-like payment system. These benefits balance out the obstacles and arguably make the latest move worthwhile in the long term, which is the period that they have in mind, not the short- or medium-terms per se.

May you live in interesting times. Yes indeed we are!

Information versus Misinformation in the Battle for Multipolarism

There have been some momentous developments since the year commenced, but these have rarely made it into the minds of North Americans. It has been said that what is happening in Ukraine is a hybrid war being fought on multiple fronts, one of which is the sphere of information:

[Eurasia Economic Union’s Sergey] Glazyev: My book, The Last World War, that I already mentioned, which was published as far back as 2015, argued that the likelihood of this happening eventually is very high. In this hybrid war, economic warfare and informational/cognitive warfare are key theaters of conflict. On both of these fronts, the U.S. and NATO countries have overwhelming superiority and I did not have any doubt that they would take full advantage of this in due course.

As far as this informational/cognitive warfare is concerned, professor of philosophy Peter Ludlow at Northwestern University published an article which appeared in the New York Times nearly a decade ago entitled The Real War on Reality. I'll quote it in part:

This may sound like nothing so much as a “Matrix”-like fantasy, but it is distinctly real, and resembles in some ways the employment of “Psyops” (psychological operations), which as most students of recent American history know, have been part of the nation’s military strategy for decades. The military’s “Unconventional Warfare Training Manual” defines Psyops as “planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.” In other words, it is sometimes more effective to deceive a population into a false reality than it is to impose its will with force or conventional weapons. Of course this could also apply to one’s own population if you chose to view it as an “enemy” whose “motives, reasoning, and behavior” needed to be controlled.

Returning to the Ukraine conflict, it is therefore essential that North Americans be made aware of the mythology they are being handed under the guise of "information" or "news":

As we witness the collapse of various mainstream narratives, especially those surrounding the U.S./NATO war with Russia in Ukraine, Americans should begin to reassess their understanding of U.S. national leadership. Most American citizens have no notion of the great disparity between what their government does overseas and the stories they hear from its mouthpieces. As a result, Americans unwittingly support all sorts of foreign operations with little or no understanding of what is actually going on. For years, they have been misled by a non-stop propaganda campaign that is only now beginning to crumble. We are experiencing the death throes of the United States’ unipolar hegemony over large parts of world. Until citizens begin to realize the magnitude of their government’s policy deceptions, it will become increasingly difficult to understand the United States’ changing global position and adjust to the effects of the growing negative perception of our country held by many people around the world.

...Go read the whole thing, especially if you are North American. Most of the rest of the world doesn't need such deprogramming since it is more or less innoculated against the West's mythical narrative.

While the above article from The American Conservative is much more extensive in its coverage (via the various valuable links included), one mustn't forget the particulars of the Ukraine conflict. Perhaps of greatest importance is to understand that the war didn't start in 2022; it started in 2014 with the Maidan coup. A succinct eleven minute summary is given by Jeffrey Sachs in the following brief video:



So where do things stand today and where are they headed? I was actually correct earlier this year when I contradicted many claims that Russia was preparing a massive military offensive in Ukraine's Donbass that could possibly even make its way to Kiev. Why should Russia change what it has been doing when it has been relatively successful so far?, I asked. Rather than explain my view, you cannot do better than listen to Brian Berletic:



Finally, it is essential to keep one thing in mind: This "war" extends beyond what is happening in Ukraine, Poland and Eastern Europe. Check out what is happening in the Middle East, re-baptized as Western Asia:

...the reconciliation between Saudi Arabia and Iran is also a precursor to their induction as BRICS members in a near future. To be sure, there is a Russian-Chinese understanding already on this score. The BRICS membership for Saudi Arabia and Iran will radically reset the power dynamic in the international system.

Go read the whole thing. And while you're at it, read this, too.

The Coming War on China - A film by John Pilger

U.S. Imperialism doesn't sleep.

John Pilger’s 60th documentary is both a warning and an inspiring story of resistance.

And on the "other end" you have a modernized version of Halford Mackinder's Heartland Theory:

Mackinder is best known for his doctrine of the “Heartland.” Geopolitical strategy was about the endgame of controlling the Heartland—or the enormous transcontinental land mass of Eurasia, encompassing Eastern Europe, Russia through Siberia, and Central Asia. The Heartland, together with the remainder of Asia and Africa, made up the World Island. The Heartland itself was defined by its inaccessibility to sea, making it “the greatest natural fortress on earth.”7 The Columbian Age dominated by sea power, Mackinder argued, was coming to an end to be replaced by a new Eurasian age in which land power would be decisive. The development of land transportation and communication meant that land power could finally rival sea power. In the new Eurasian Age whoever ruled the Heartland, if also equipped with a modern navy, would be able to outflank the maritime world—the world controlled by the British and U.S. empires.

Monthly Review