armchairphilosopher replied to your post: Do actions speak louder than words or is the pen mightier than the sword?
“We are told to remember the idea, not the man, because a man can fail. He can be caught. He can be killed and forgotten… But you cannot kill an idea, cannot touch it or hold it. Ideas do not bleed, it cannot feel pain, and it does not love.”
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» To avoid counting civilian deaths, Obama re-defined 'militant' to mean 'all military-age males in strike zone'
By Glenn Greenwald
This morning, the New York Times has a very lengthy and detailed article about President Obama’s counter-Terrorism policies based on interviews with “three dozen of his current and former advisers.” I’m writing separately about the numerous revelations contained in that article, but want specifically to highlight this one vital passage about how the Obama administration determines who is a “militant.” The article explains that Obama’s rhetorical emphasis on avoiding civilian deaths “did not significantly change” the drone program, because Obama himself simply expanded the definition of a “militant” to ensure that it includes virtually everyone killed by his drone strikes. Just read this remarkable passage:
Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.
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The conservative glee over the failure of Third World socialisms — so convenient in proving the superiority of First World capitalisms — requires one more preliminary comment. Those failures are the result of deeply flawed attempts to deal with the human agony of poverty and underdevelopment imposed upon these societies by an amoral Western capitalism, which rationalized its crimes in the name of a ‘civilizing mission.’
If it is critically important to understand Third World defeats in their historical and structural context, one should never lose sight of the fact that the men and women who suffered them were often initially motivated by a completely understandable rage against injustice and frustrated by conditions not of their own making.
"Michael Harrington - Socialism: Past and Future
I’m in love with this book. Expect lots of fantastic quotes from it on your dash if you follow me. lol.
(via joerobsbanks)
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"On taxes, the Democrat favors a top income tax rate of 39.5%, and the Republican favors a top rate of 35%. Well, ain’t democracy grand? We get to debate a whole four and a half percentage points. We better spread this system all over the world!"Tom Woods (in 2007) but still relevant today. (via eltigrechico)
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"The Afghan jihad was the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA. In fiscal year 1987 alone, according to one estimate, clandestine U.S. military aid to the mujahideen amounted to 660 million dollars—”more than the total of American aid to the contras in Nicaragua” (Ahmad and Barnet 1988,44). Apart from direct U.S. funding, the CIA financed the war through the drug trade, just as in Nicaragua. The impact on Afghanistan and Pakistan was devastating. Prior to the Afghan jihad, there was no local production of heroin in Pakistan and Afghanistan; the production of opium (a very different drug than heroin) was directed to small regional markets. Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics at University of Ottawa, estimates that within only two years of the CIA’s entry into the Afghan jihad, “the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world’s top heroin producer, supplying 60 percent of U.S. demand,” (2001:4). The lever for expanding the drug trade was simple: As the jihad spread inside Afghanistan, the mujahideen required peasants to pay an opium tax, Instead of waging a war on drugs, the CIA turned the drug trade into a way of financing the Cold War. By the end of the anti-Soviet jihad, the Central Asian region produced 75 percent of the world’s opium, worth billions of dollars in revenue (McCoy 1997)."Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism (via maozedongisnotcool)
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More than 1,500 Afghans blocked the highway between Kabul and Kandahar in Seed Abad, Wardak province, Afghanistan, Saturday, May 26, 2012. The protesters demanded a stop to military night operations.
A NATO airstrike killed eight members of a family on May 27, including children, according to Afghan officials who claim that such attacks damage the civilian population’s trust in international troops who have been fighting in the country for more than a decade.
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"The actual reasons for the 1982 invasion have never been concealed in Israel, though they are rated “X” here. A few weeks after the invasion began, Israel’s leading academic specialist on the Palestinians, Yehoshua Porath, pointed out that the decision to invade “flowed from the very fact that the cease-fire had been observed” by the PLO, a “veritable catastrophe” for the Israeli government because ir endangered the policy of evading a political settlement. The PLO was gaining respectability thanks to its preference for negotiations over terror. The Israeli government’s hope, therefore, was to compel “the stricken PLO” to “return to its earlier terrorism,” thus “undercutting the danger” of negotiations. As Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir later stated, Israel went to war because there was “a terrible danger…. Not so much a military one as a political one.” The invasion was intended to “undermine the position of the moderates within [the PLO] ranks” and thus to block” the PLO `peace offensive’” and “to halt [the PLO’s] rise to political respectability” (strategic analyst Avner Yaniv); it should be called “the war to safeguard the occupation of the West Bank,” having been motivated by Begin’s “fear of the momentum of the peace process,” according to Israeli Arabist and former head of military intelligence Gen. Yehoshaphat Harkabi. US backing for Israel’s aggression, including veto of Security Council efforts to stop the slaughter, was presumably based on the same reasoning."Noam Chomsky, “Limited War” in Lebanon (via fyeahnoamchomsky)
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"Say: O unbelievers! I do not serve that which you serve, nor do you serve Him Whom I serve, nor am I going to serve that which you serve, nor are you going to serve Him Whom I serve. You shall have your religion, and I shall have my religion."Al-Kafiroon, Quran
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"If we don’t understand that the reaction [happens] because we invade and occupy their countries, we have bases in their countries - and we haven’t done that just since 9/11 but we had done that for a long time. It was the air force base in Saudi Arabia before 9/11 that was given as the excuse. If we don’t understand that then we can’t win this war against terrorism."Dr Ron Paul
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» Ideas and Opinions.: The entire concept of 'exploration' is taught wrong in schools.
All throughout our school education, K-12 in most places, we are taught this idea of ‘discovery and exploration.’ People like Columbus, Cortez, and Magellan all come to mind when we think of this idea of ‘exploration’. When in reality we won’t realize that this is a white…
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Keep calm…
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"The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don’t know each other, but we talk and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you.
And our governments are very much the same."Marjane Satrapi, Iranian Graphic Novelist (via humanformat)
