News and Views
In a very special Ron Paul Liberty Report, we speak with Benjamin Ahdoot, an Iranian-American of Jewish heritage who just spent three months in Iran. Are the neocons telling us the truth about Iran? Benjamin sets them straight! Don’t miss this interview!
Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.
It seems that some who have the ears of U.S. elite decision-makers are at least shifting away from wishing to provoke wars with Russia and China.
In recent articles, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Thomas Graham, two architects of the US cold war with Russia, have acknowledged that the era of uncontested US global imperialism is coming to an end. Both analysts urge more cooperation with Russia and China to achieve traditional, still imperial, US aims. Mr. Graham recommends a shifting mix of competition and cooperation, aiming toward a "confident management of ambiguity." Mr. Brzezinski calls for deputizing other countries, such as Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran to carry out the combined aims of the US, Russia and China so that this triumvirate could control other people’s land and resources.
It’s surely worthwhile to wonder what effect opinions such as Brzezinski’s and Graham’s might have upon how US resources are allotted, whether to meet human needs or to further enlarge the US Department of Defense (DOD) and further enrich the corporations that profit from US investments in weapons technology.
Why should American citizens subsidize the R&D and manufacture of military materials only to have them sold overseas to the profit of the arms manufacturers? And why on earth would we send more weapons to Saudi Arabia with its abysmal human rights record and brutal war on Yemen? Very special guest Senator Rand Paul joins Ron Paul on today’s Liberty Report to let us know what he’s doing to stop the arms floodgate:
Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.
The United States over the weekend denied travel to a former British ambassador, Craig Murray, who was also a British diplomat for some 30 years, and is the author of several books.
Murray has stood twice for election to the House of Commons. He was “honored” by being thrown out of Uzbekistan by its repressive government after risking his life to expose appalling human rights abuses there. He is not a terrorist and is not a social media jihadi. He has no criminal record, no connection to drug smuggling, and does have a return ticket, a hotel reservation and ample funds to cover his expenses.
He is however seen as a threat to the United States.
Ambassador Murray was headed to the U.S. this week to be Master of Ceremonies at an award ceremony honoring John Kiriakou, the CIA torture whistleblower. Kiriakou was the only US government official to go to jail in connection with the torture program, and all he did was help expose it to the media. The event is sponsored by Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (of which I am a member.)
Continue reading “US Denies Entry to Ex-UK Ambassador Who Is Critical of US Foreign Policy”
While everyone gives lip-service to protecting customers’ privacy these days, many major US tech companies are known to be in bed with the NSA on wholesale surveillance. It’s tough to know, then, how seriously to take security promises from such companies.
A good rule of thumb, however, might be derived from Telegram, an open-sourced private messaging application with a soaring user base. While government officials sort of pooh-pooh anything that seems too private, the reaction to Telegram is downright apoplectic.
Several European officials are reacting with absolute fury toward Telegram for being a serious obstacle to surveillance, with French officials complaining they struggled to even find ways to get in touch with the company to demand they hand over information.
Even then, they’re not getting the chat logs from Telegram, because part of the design infrastructure ensuring the privacy of such chats is that the company doesn’t keep chat logs in the first place, and therefore has nothing to hand over.
The hostility toward Telegram, and the claims that they’re facilitating ISIS because their service isn’t built to be spied on, is a good indication that they’re doing their job pretty well.
Indeed, officials are calling Telegram a “technological nightmare,” which for people who don’t want those officials reading what they write can only be a good thing.
I was reading the novelist Ursula K. Le Guin and came across the following commentary by her:
“A hero whose heroism consists of killing people is uninteresting to me, and I detest the hormonal war orgies of our visual media … War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to ‘a war against’ whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off. This is puerile, misleading, and degrading. In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the ‘right’ side and therefore will win.”
This passage is copyrighted 2012, and surely Le Guin is commenting in part on the American political and war scene, even if these comments came as an afterword to her novel A Wizard of Earthsea.
The stories we tell ourselves – our driving narratives and metaphors – are very powerful. I learned this almost three decades ago from one of my professors at Johns Hopkins. We were talking about the scientific revolution, the label applied after the fact by historians to the era of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. Did that era truly deserve the label of a “revolution” in thought? On one level, yes. A heliocentric vision replaced a geocentric one. Newtonian physics replaced Aristotelian metaphysics. But on another level, the label was misleading. If you view this era only through a “revolutionary” lens, everything gets magnified and refracted through it. You’re always looking for evidence of the “revolution” that you know is there. The revolutionary narrative/metaphor, in other words, restricts and distorts your vision. It also tends to answer questions before they’re even asked. Certain historical figures get labeled as “revolutionaries,” others as “reactionaries,” some as winners, others as losers, almost without having to think about it.
Continue reading “War Pabulum: The Perils of War as a Master Narrative”
