News media don't often have a kind word for Trump. Here's an exception.
http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.777881?utm_content=%2Fisrael-news%2F1.777881&utm_medium=email&utm_source=smartfocus&utm_campaign=newsletter-daily&utm_term=20170319-15%3A03
I have to admit that I don't usually have a kind word for him either. But let's look at the bigger picture.
American (and western in general) foreign policy has been a disaster for almost eighty years. American wars have left a trail of disaster and murder all over the world. And, almost without exception, they have been losers. The mighty US, in 16 years, cannot defeat a small, poor, and divided Afghanistan. In Vietnam, it napalmed, destroyed the agriculture of Vietnam, and killed millions of Vietnamese. And it still lost.
It accomplished nothing in Iraq. (Nor did our news media ever mention the courage of that small nation which stood up to the mighty U.S.) Syria is a chaos with no indication the U.S. can win. American bombs (and sometimes American bombers) are murdering a nation already starving in Yemen, and they don't seem to be able to win it. The U.S. has been losing ground in the middle east despite massive spending to keep Muslim Jihadists armed and trained to murder Syrians. In Saudi Arabia, Britain and the U.S. created and still maintain the the world's most brutal dictatorship. Americans, in general, are in no rush to die 'for their country'. In fact, the American army is largely made up of foreign mercenaries. hired thugs.
The net result is a U.S. that is hated in most of the world, including Mexico and South America. And included in that result is a stunning lack of any success. On the contrary, the U.S. is in real danger of losing influence in the middle east and in Asia. And even some European countries are shuffling nervously toward the exit. And it is likely that only the kiss-ups, like the British, will remain faithful.
The major result, which our news media seem unaware of, is massive failure in foreign policy, perhaps the greatest such failure in history.
In comparison to every American president since Roosevelt, Trump could be called a foreign affairs genius. (But let me put the important part of that in capital letters. Trump is a foreign affairs genius IN COMPARISON only.)
Generally, the U.S. has dissolved much of the world into chaos. Part of that chaos are the states of Israel and Palestine.
As the article in Harretz (above) mentions, Jews and Muslims lived together in peace for centuries in the Holy Land. Then, in World War 1, a British Lord intervened.
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2010/08/arab-palestine-jewish-rights
Lord Balfour had two objectives in mind. One was to solidify the British foothold in the middle east. The other was to get rid of British and European Jews. (Hitler was by no means the western world's first racist.)
However, Jews of Europe at the time had to wish to move. They had sense enough to realize that Judaism is a religion, not a race. They had, like all of us, very mixed blood. (MY DNA has a trace of west Asian barbarian.) So it was really Hitler, not Balfour, who created a Jewish state as European Jews of the early, postwar years, denied entry to countries like the U.S. and Canada, stormed Palestine, and took it.
The western powers rubber-stamped that. The U.S. then armed Israel so that it has become the world's eighth ranked military power. That had nothing to do with helping Jews. It had to do with the U.S. displacing a British foothold in the region.
The Palestinians, who had lived in peace with Palestinian Jews now found themselves pushed out of their homes, and into the less desirable region of what had been Palestine. Those who remained in Israel found themselves treated as contemptible inferiors And those who moved to the new Palestine found themselves routinely invaded to take their land and kick them off it and out of their homes.
Hitler did not destroy Judaism. But he certainly destroyed a great many Judaic principles.
Trump wants to restore peace to the region. He might well be naive. But he is at least trying to clean up the horror created by a century of western greed and abuse.
Credit where credit is due.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Also in Israel, President Netanyahu is angry at his country's public broadcaster (much like Canada's nationally-owned CBC). As such public broadcasters are inclined to do, it tries to tell the truth. And that's a no-no.
Here in Canada, the CBC faces constant threats, and for the same reason. There are important people who feel it's more important for us to be in ignorance of what's going on.
No, better to do what newspapers like Brunswick news do. What's the biggest story in the Canada and World section? It's about how Chuck Berry influenced rock 'n' roll.
There is, however, an inspiring letter to the editor about how immigrants, people of different races and religions, are swarming in to take our jobs. Too true, baby.
When the first Decarie (from France) settled in Montreal, the aboriginal people already there should have put a stop to it. Then we let in Protestants, Jews, English, Italians Greeks, Irish, just a smorgasbord of job thieves. Two of them would have been ancestors of the letter writer.
The writer feels they should have stayed home to work in their own countries. So true. Of course, it's hard to work in countries where a million and more have been killed by us, refugeed by us, and their cities destroyed by us, and the survivors fled from the horror. And it's hard for their orphaned children to go to schools that we bombed.
They're here because we gave them no choice. So just consider accepting a tiny fraction of them as our good deed for the day.
____________________________________________________________________________
An indicator of how American foreign policy has been disastrous for decades is the move of Russia into Syria. It's there to stay. The U.S. policy has made the whole region unstable. And this is exactly why Trump wants a peaceful settlement to the Israel/Palestine issue. (And the oil industry, I suspect, doesn't want one.)
http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.778033?utm_content=%2Fisrael-news%2F1.778033&utm_medium=email&utm_source=smartfocus&utm_campaign=newsletter-breaking-news&utm_term=20170318-21%3A03
_________________________________________________________________________________
For over a century the people of China suffered in a poverty imposed by western capitalists. Mass starvation was frequent. All of those years were steadily downhill. Much of the old China was still visible in the days when I worked there. And there were plenty of people who remembered when the only food was cabbage. Now, with the western capitalists disposed of, China has magnificent cities, with one hundred of them having over a million people each.
So let's fast forward twenty years. Can you imagine the progress China will have made by then?
Now can you understand why leaders of western corporations want war with China - now?
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/mar/20/my-village-wenling-china-author-xiaolu-guo
______________________________________________________________________________
Here's glowing story about a wunnerful, wunnerful America family. David Rockefeller has died at 101. He was, says The Guardian, a philanthropist as all his family had been. Funny, though, how The Guardian missed most of the story.
The Rockefellers, going back into the nineteenth century, made their money out of paying low wages for work in bad and even dangerous conditions. That caused trouble about a century ago when the Rockefellers faced workers who demanded better pay. The 'philanthopic' Rockefellers kicked them out of their company owned mining town, leaving them camped in tents for the winter. Then, one day, company guards and militia opened fire on the families in tents.
It was very embarassing. Bad PR. So they hired MacKenzie King (later prime minister of Canada) to set up a campaign showing the Rockefellers were really 'jes' folks like everybody else. There were newspaper photos of Rockefeller sons dancing with coal miners' daughters. To this day, there are people who believe all the Rockefeller boys marrie coal miners' daughters.
What they gave was always less than what they took. But The Guardian has a story on this that reads like a page from Brunswick News. Mr. Rockefeller was such a wonderful man. And he met famous people. And he rose brilliantly in the business world. And, of course, being born a billionaire had nothing to do with it.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/20/david-rockefeller-dies-jp-morgan-chase-philanthropy
__________________________________________________________________________
When the Russian were bombing jihadists in Aleppo, we got lots of news stories about how their bombs were killing children. And we got lots of wonderful stuff about the 'white helmets' saving children. Remember the photo of the little boy who became the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary?
Luckily, American and Iraqi bombs dropping on the city of Mosul don't kill children. - unless you look at these pictures...
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/heartbreaking-photos-iraqi-children-killed-by-air-strikes-battle-against-isis-mosul-intensifies-1612248
__________________________________________________________________________________
And here's another piece of news we haven't been given.
Aren't those North Koreans just terrible? We'll have to go to war with them again. People who think that never think of the butcher's bill. I think it would be even higher than this article says, probably much higher.
And China, looking at the attack on its neighbour, thus permitting an American military presence on the China border, would have to intervene to prevent that. And then the death count on either side would beggar any estimate.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46687.htm
________________________________________________________________________________
And on a lighter note.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46686.htm
______________________________________________________________________
The tax story in Canada is very similar to this one. Thank you, Mr. Trudeau.
https://theintercept.com/2017/03/18/trumps-2005-tax-bill-doesnt-mean-the-tax-system-is-working/
Oh, The American government is putting forward a health care package in which those who are out of work will get no health care. Damn right. Those unemployed people are just lazy. The 1930s depression was really just a mass outbreak of laziness.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Here's an angle on Mexican migration to the U.S. that I have never seen in our news media. (Be sure to read it to the end.)
http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/03/20/is-trumps-wall-necessary-mexican-migration-over-the-last-century/
_________________________________________________________________________________
This next one is very, very long. And I must add another piece to it.
It's about the need for free university tuition. What I want to add is the desperate need to make university teachers learn how to teach. I spent nine years in university - and almost all of them were spent memorizing things that I have never needed, and have long since forgotten.
Students don't need memorizing. They need the capacity to think, to analyze, to make judgements. Very few university teachers know how to teach that. That's why so many of us read newspapers without being able to make any judgement about them. That's why so many of us are easily suckered by propaganda.
http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/03/19/50-reasons-for-free-university-education-as-we-bequeath-the-young-a-dying-planet/
________________________________________________________________________
And then there are our good friends at Monsanto.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/39904-behind-a-corporate-monster-how-monsanto-pushes-agricultural-domination
________________________________________________________________________________
Sorry. Today's blog is long because I ran away with myself at the start. The problem, in this case, was that the creation of Israel needed a lot of explaining. For a start, it was part of a political game to give the U.S. extra power in the middle east. And some twenty years earlier, Britain had been floating the idea of Jewish homeland - essentially in a desire to cut France out of the region.
Nations very seldom tell the truth about why they do things. (The U.S. had hoped to use WW2 to destroy British imperial power, and to take over from the British. They succeeded in destroying the British. But they weren't able to take over the big prize - China.)
__________________________________________________________________________________
http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.777881?utm_content=%2Fisrael-news%2F1.777881&utm_medium=email&utm_source=smartfocus&utm_campaign=newsletter-daily&utm_term=20170319-15%3A03
I have to admit that I don't usually have a kind word for him either. But let's look at the bigger picture.
American (and western in general) foreign policy has been a disaster for almost eighty years. American wars have left a trail of disaster and murder all over the world. And, almost without exception, they have been losers. The mighty US, in 16 years, cannot defeat a small, poor, and divided Afghanistan. In Vietnam, it napalmed, destroyed the agriculture of Vietnam, and killed millions of Vietnamese. And it still lost.
It accomplished nothing in Iraq. (Nor did our news media ever mention the courage of that small nation which stood up to the mighty U.S.) Syria is a chaos with no indication the U.S. can win. American bombs (and sometimes American bombers) are murdering a nation already starving in Yemen, and they don't seem to be able to win it. The U.S. has been losing ground in the middle east despite massive spending to keep Muslim Jihadists armed and trained to murder Syrians. In Saudi Arabia, Britain and the U.S. created and still maintain the the world's most brutal dictatorship. Americans, in general, are in no rush to die 'for their country'. In fact, the American army is largely made up of foreign mercenaries. hired thugs.
The net result is a U.S. that is hated in most of the world, including Mexico and South America. And included in that result is a stunning lack of any success. On the contrary, the U.S. is in real danger of losing influence in the middle east and in Asia. And even some European countries are shuffling nervously toward the exit. And it is likely that only the kiss-ups, like the British, will remain faithful.
The major result, which our news media seem unaware of, is massive failure in foreign policy, perhaps the greatest such failure in history.
In comparison to every American president since Roosevelt, Trump could be called a foreign affairs genius. (But let me put the important part of that in capital letters. Trump is a foreign affairs genius IN COMPARISON only.)
Generally, the U.S. has dissolved much of the world into chaos. Part of that chaos are the states of Israel and Palestine.
As the article in Harretz (above) mentions, Jews and Muslims lived together in peace for centuries in the Holy Land. Then, in World War 1, a British Lord intervened.
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2010/08/arab-palestine-jewish-rights
Lord Balfour had two objectives in mind. One was to solidify the British foothold in the middle east. The other was to get rid of British and European Jews. (Hitler was by no means the western world's first racist.)
However, Jews of Europe at the time had to wish to move. They had sense enough to realize that Judaism is a religion, not a race. They had, like all of us, very mixed blood. (MY DNA has a trace of west Asian barbarian.) So it was really Hitler, not Balfour, who created a Jewish state as European Jews of the early, postwar years, denied entry to countries like the U.S. and Canada, stormed Palestine, and took it.
The western powers rubber-stamped that. The U.S. then armed Israel so that it has become the world's eighth ranked military power. That had nothing to do with helping Jews. It had to do with the U.S. displacing a British foothold in the region.
The Palestinians, who had lived in peace with Palestinian Jews now found themselves pushed out of their homes, and into the less desirable region of what had been Palestine. Those who remained in Israel found themselves treated as contemptible inferiors And those who moved to the new Palestine found themselves routinely invaded to take their land and kick them off it and out of their homes.
Hitler did not destroy Judaism. But he certainly destroyed a great many Judaic principles.
Trump wants to restore peace to the region. He might well be naive. But he is at least trying to clean up the horror created by a century of western greed and abuse.
Credit where credit is due.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Also in Israel, President Netanyahu is angry at his country's public broadcaster (much like Canada's nationally-owned CBC). As such public broadcasters are inclined to do, it tries to tell the truth. And that's a no-no.
Here in Canada, the CBC faces constant threats, and for the same reason. There are important people who feel it's more important for us to be in ignorance of what's going on.
No, better to do what newspapers like Brunswick news do. What's the biggest story in the Canada and World section? It's about how Chuck Berry influenced rock 'n' roll.
There is, however, an inspiring letter to the editor about how immigrants, people of different races and religions, are swarming in to take our jobs. Too true, baby.
When the first Decarie (from France) settled in Montreal, the aboriginal people already there should have put a stop to it. Then we let in Protestants, Jews, English, Italians Greeks, Irish, just a smorgasbord of job thieves. Two of them would have been ancestors of the letter writer.
The writer feels they should have stayed home to work in their own countries. So true. Of course, it's hard to work in countries where a million and more have been killed by us, refugeed by us, and their cities destroyed by us, and the survivors fled from the horror. And it's hard for their orphaned children to go to schools that we bombed.
They're here because we gave them no choice. So just consider accepting a tiny fraction of them as our good deed for the day.
____________________________________________________________________________
An indicator of how American foreign policy has been disastrous for decades is the move of Russia into Syria. It's there to stay. The U.S. policy has made the whole region unstable. And this is exactly why Trump wants a peaceful settlement to the Israel/Palestine issue. (And the oil industry, I suspect, doesn't want one.)
http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.778033?utm_content=%2Fisrael-news%2F1.778033&utm_medium=email&utm_source=smartfocus&utm_campaign=newsletter-breaking-news&utm_term=20170318-21%3A03
_________________________________________________________________________________
For over a century the people of China suffered in a poverty imposed by western capitalists. Mass starvation was frequent. All of those years were steadily downhill. Much of the old China was still visible in the days when I worked there. And there were plenty of people who remembered when the only food was cabbage. Now, with the western capitalists disposed of, China has magnificent cities, with one hundred of them having over a million people each.
So let's fast forward twenty years. Can you imagine the progress China will have made by then?
Now can you understand why leaders of western corporations want war with China - now?
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/mar/20/my-village-wenling-china-author-xiaolu-guo
______________________________________________________________________________
Here's glowing story about a wunnerful, wunnerful America family. David Rockefeller has died at 101. He was, says The Guardian, a philanthropist as all his family had been. Funny, though, how The Guardian missed most of the story.
The Rockefellers, going back into the nineteenth century, made their money out of paying low wages for work in bad and even dangerous conditions. That caused trouble about a century ago when the Rockefellers faced workers who demanded better pay. The 'philanthopic' Rockefellers kicked them out of their company owned mining town, leaving them camped in tents for the winter. Then, one day, company guards and militia opened fire on the families in tents.
It was very embarassing. Bad PR. So they hired MacKenzie King (later prime minister of Canada) to set up a campaign showing the Rockefellers were really 'jes' folks like everybody else. There were newspaper photos of Rockefeller sons dancing with coal miners' daughters. To this day, there are people who believe all the Rockefeller boys marrie coal miners' daughters.
What they gave was always less than what they took. But The Guardian has a story on this that reads like a page from Brunswick News. Mr. Rockefeller was such a wonderful man. And he met famous people. And he rose brilliantly in the business world. And, of course, being born a billionaire had nothing to do with it.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/20/david-rockefeller-dies-jp-morgan-chase-philanthropy
__________________________________________________________________________
When the Russian were bombing jihadists in Aleppo, we got lots of news stories about how their bombs were killing children. And we got lots of wonderful stuff about the 'white helmets' saving children. Remember the photo of the little boy who became the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary?
Luckily, American and Iraqi bombs dropping on the city of Mosul don't kill children. - unless you look at these pictures...
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/heartbreaking-photos-iraqi-children-killed-by-air-strikes-battle-against-isis-mosul-intensifies-1612248
__________________________________________________________________________________
And here's another piece of news we haven't been given.
Aren't those North Koreans just terrible? We'll have to go to war with them again. People who think that never think of the butcher's bill. I think it would be even higher than this article says, probably much higher.
And China, looking at the attack on its neighbour, thus permitting an American military presence on the China border, would have to intervene to prevent that. And then the death count on either side would beggar any estimate.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46687.htm
________________________________________________________________________________
And on a lighter note.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46686.htm
______________________________________________________________________
The tax story in Canada is very similar to this one. Thank you, Mr. Trudeau.
https://theintercept.com/2017/03/18/trumps-2005-tax-bill-doesnt-mean-the-tax-system-is-working/
Oh, The American government is putting forward a health care package in which those who are out of work will get no health care. Damn right. Those unemployed people are just lazy. The 1930s depression was really just a mass outbreak of laziness.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Here's an angle on Mexican migration to the U.S. that I have never seen in our news media. (Be sure to read it to the end.)
http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/03/20/is-trumps-wall-necessary-mexican-migration-over-the-last-century/
_________________________________________________________________________________
This next one is very, very long. And I must add another piece to it.
It's about the need for free university tuition. What I want to add is the desperate need to make university teachers learn how to teach. I spent nine years in university - and almost all of them were spent memorizing things that I have never needed, and have long since forgotten.
Students don't need memorizing. They need the capacity to think, to analyze, to make judgements. Very few university teachers know how to teach that. That's why so many of us read newspapers without being able to make any judgement about them. That's why so many of us are easily suckered by propaganda.
http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/03/19/50-reasons-for-free-university-education-as-we-bequeath-the-young-a-dying-planet/
________________________________________________________________________
And then there are our good friends at Monsanto.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/39904-behind-a-corporate-monster-how-monsanto-pushes-agricultural-domination
________________________________________________________________________________
Sorry. Today's blog is long because I ran away with myself at the start. The problem, in this case, was that the creation of Israel needed a lot of explaining. For a start, it was part of a political game to give the U.S. extra power in the middle east. And some twenty years earlier, Britain had been floating the idea of Jewish homeland - essentially in a desire to cut France out of the region.
Nations very seldom tell the truth about why they do things. (The U.S. had hoped to use WW2 to destroy British imperial power, and to take over from the British. They succeeded in destroying the British. But they weren't able to take over the big prize - China.)
__________________________________________________________________________________
.jpg)
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment