Run, don't walk, to Arthur Silber's latest, and get tomorrow's news today. That's right, Silber has pierced the veil of time and brings back news of Barack Obama's big announcement, scheduled for Tuesday night, when -- to the vast surprise of absolutely no one on earth (except, of course, our serious media analysts, who have been puzzling and puzzling till their puzzlers are sore about the "debate" on escalating the war in Afghanistan) -- Obama will announce that he is, er, escalating the war in Afghanistan.

What's more, Silber has done us all the yeoman service of pre-wading through "the reactions to Obama's speech dribbling from the slack mouths operated by unfocused minds," who will take up the "debate" on the efficacy of Obama's oh-so-deeply contemplated "new" strategy for securing the empire's Central Asian frontier. But as usual, Silber goes far beyond PR trappings of the day's news (or even tomorrow's news) to outline the real reasons and rationales behind Obama's "new" policy, which is, of course, only the same old geopolitical dominance game tricked out in 21st century drag.

No excerpts this time; I am too weary, too travel-bleary, to do justice to the piece with representative cuts -- just go read the whole thing and, as Silber says, save yourself the trouble of slogging through the "stinking load of unmitigated shit" that will be dumped on our heads by the chattering classes -- and their masters, the killing classes of the imperial court -- following the announcement.

And while you're there, if you have any spare change at all, drop some in Silber's hat. As we never tire of saying here, his is a unique, and uniquely valuable, voice in these ever-more troubled days. And it is a voice that must fight its way through horrendous health problems and crushing poverty to be heard. While fools and poltroons, left and right, gorge themselves on corporate largess, pandering to prejudices, and insider savvy, Silber must depend solely on his readers to survive. So give if you got it.

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Michael B said:

Plus ca change They have a new "strategy"... They call it "realignment" but it is the same as the old "inkblot strategy" from the Vietnam War. They are pulling out of the countryside and back to the population centers. The new troops are supposed to "defend" the new enclaves. With rural communication cut, the enclaves can only be supplied by air and the country in between will essentially become a "free-fire" zone. It is a significant retreat which will get new words put around it. In essence, they are betting on firepower to maintain the "airheads" and keep NATO casualties down (while having the opposite effect on the Afghans). Before the Americans, the French went through an identical cycle in IndoChina. Giap wrote that forcing the French to pullback from the countryside also signaled the change in NLF tactics from small unit to large unit tactics. Eventually, it developed into large scale attacks on increasingly more important "airheads", the last being Dienbienphu. _____________________________ Strength in humility is a myth. Passive denial of the enormity of the problems that confront us and the radical solutions needed to address these, while understandable in light of all the devastation being visited upon the Earth by developers, corporate greed heads and a largely acquiescent populace, is still an indefensible and repugnant position. As long as women and African-Americans were nice humble and passive what did they get? Nothing. Unless you count subjugation and servitude as something. Would those in power one day have awakened one day in a particularly genial and loving mood having experienced some psycho-spiritual transformation and said, "You are so nice and humble I'm going to allow you to vote, own property and while we're at it let's throw in equal pay?" Dream on. It took suffragettes and civil rights activists being insistent, unpleasantly arrogant, unrelenting and a willingness to risk what little they did have to attain the few freedoms that are "allowed" today. This meant laying their bodies on the line. Those who are destroying our earth and our communities at breakneck speed are as humble and caring as barracudas, with all apologies to the more gentle piscine creatures, and will not easily or at all relinquish their stranglehold on the gasping planet or your neck. What it will take is nothing short of large scale purposeful sustained direct actions that bring the system to a halt. This means tremendous sacrifice. This means discomfort. In this there is the inevitably of tremendous risk. The only remedy will be when people begin to get interested in taking back active control of the processes that rule their lives and work with each other rather than crossing their fingers and heading off to the ballot box. There is zero chance that our system can be fixed through the officially-approved mechanisms. Whether overtly recognized or not, there’s a war going on — the US ruling class against all the rest of us. It’s essentially a class war. The rulers want you to remain a Democrat, because the D’s are a ruling-class institution, whose job is guiding the Dem half of the populace in paths that are safe for the rulers. To remain a Dem voter, and to swallow whatever slop the party dishes up, is to passively assent to this arrangement. Therefore, your primary focus should be on resisting & criticizing the system, not on adapting yourself to it. You should be talking with your friends & family about the very real things that are wrong. You should be trying to make whatever contribution you can to elevating political consciousness. Accepting the slop of the Dem Party is the opposite of all that: it deadens political consciousness, & only makes your enemies stronger. We need Latin American-style "socialist" revolution in the streets, complemented by effective traditional political organizing, social-class based. Genuine socialism is good. An honest look at history shows that it's what the global fascists truly fear.

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December 01, 2009
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