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Shock Doctrine Uber Alles: Germany’s New Greek Colony

(UPDATED BELOW) No Stukas, no stormtroopers, just a few strokes of the pen! Patrick Cockburn reports on the significance of Greece’s final surrender to the German-led blitzkrieg of bankers that has ravaged the cradle of democracy: Greeks [signed a deal] with the Eurozone leaders [on Tuesday] that will cede much of their country’s independence. Greece will become an economic – and to a large extent a political – colony of Germany and its allies. Berlin will have a say in everything from the choice of prime minister to the types of medicines dispensed by pharmacies. In return for €230bn, made

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It’s All Right, Ma: It’s Life and Life Only

While washing dishes after the family supper tonight, I was listening, rather idly, to BBC Radio 4, some radio play or dramatization. And suddenly I heard, in passing, what struck me as a very apt description of life itself: “It felt intimate, surreal and meaningless, all at the same time.” Postscript: Looked it up later; the line came from the dramatization of a story called “The Warrah,” by Lucy Catherine.

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Life Lessons From the Afghan Conflict

This New York Times story provides a clear lesson — not only for “young Afghans,” but for all of us in this increasingly drone-covered world: Do not, under any circumstances, “move in a tactical fashion.” Or else  the defenders of Western civilization will blast you into bloody goo. 8 Young Afghans Killed in Strike, NATO Acknowledges … Afghan relatives of those who died and Mohammed Tahir Safi, an adviser to President Hamid Karzai and the leader of the Afghan investigation team, said that those killed were young boys who had taken their sheep and goats to graze outside the village.

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Fever Dream: The No-Eyed Nightmare of Terror War

Here’s a piece of “imaginative journalism” I published 10 years ago, before the invasion of Iraq. It speaks both to the imagined future of the then-impending war crime — and to the future of the Terror War era … a nightmare of history we are still growing into. The Base NSA Echelon 33, CentComm: Email monitored 10/22/04. Dispatched DC Yo, Ed! I’m looking out the window of Watchtower 19 in Force Zone Seven. They’re loading up the dead wagon. Three friendlies, two uncardeds, the usual collateral – and one bug. We zapped the market before the bug got his hard-on

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Breaking the Glass: Beyond the Cataloguing of Imperial Evils

I had a curious experience in reading one of Glenn Greenwald’s recent posts about the relentless push for war with Iran by the media. It was, as usual, a powerful piece, marshalling a wealth of damning evidence that laid bare the corporate media’s avid — not to say rabid — eagerness to serve the desire of our ruling elites to finally break the “recalcitrant tribe” of Persians and restore Washington’s dominance over that strategically situated — and oil-rich — land. One cannot underestimate the simmering resentment still felt by American elites from their “humiliation” during the 1980 hostage crisis —

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Greek Fire: Extremist Elites Gone Wild in Democracy’s Cradle

If you want to know what is happening in Greece — and what the powers that be have in mind for your country as well — see this remarkable story by Mike Whitney at Counterpunch. What are seeing in Greece is not an” economic” program; it is — most openly and brazenly — a political program: a savagely destructive extremist ideology being imposed on ordinary people by force. In its all-pervasive brutality and tyrannical control of every aspect of life, it makes the “Shariah law” bogeyman of right-wing nightmares look like an anarchists’ picnic. And make no mistake: the extremist

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Super Savage Sunday: Obama Tightens the Screws on Iran

Arthur Silber follows up the post we linked to yesterday with some more specifics on how an effective campaign against the war with Iran might look: “The First Ad: Who Are the Nazis Now?“ Ads like these would be a devastating Zen slap in the head to the stunted American consciousness. Get on over there and read it now. Meanwhile, the Peace Laureate is tightening the screws on Iran even further. Barack Obama took a few minutes away from the big game on Super Bowl Sunday and imposed still more sanctions on Tehran — to punish them for legally pursuing

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Runaway Train: Stop the War Against Iran — Now

Almost every day brings some new barrage of fear-mongering lies and vaporous accusations from leading members of the Obama Administration and other nabobs at the top of the political-media elite, all of them aimed relentlessly at one goal: justifying military action against Iran. It is an almost exact replay of what we saw in 2002-2003 during the build-up to the war of aggression against Iraq – with one significant exception. The “progressive” opposition to the baseless warmongering is virtually non-existent this time around – because the warmonger-in-chief is their own champion, their partisan standard-bearer. Many voices that hurled thunderous denunciations

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See No Evil: A Strange Absolution of Obama’s Warmongering

It’s hard to say which is more disturbing in Patrick Cockburn’s recent analysis of America’s warmongering toward Iran: his portrait of wily Jews manipulating and “bamboozling” the American power elite into acting against their own interests and good intentions; or the ‘Amos and Andy’ echoes in the image of a Negro President too dumb to know he’s being played by wicked Hebrews. In any case, it is an astounding — and dismaying — performance from a writer who has long been one of the very best in delineating the operations of empire in the Middle East. As so often happens,

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Air America: Under the Eye of the Imperial Panopticon

  One unanticipated benefit of the relentless drive to turn every nook and cranny of the American war machine into a cash cow for private profit is the fact that so much of the nitty-gritty operational work is now put out for bids. And this can give us an occasional glimpse — through the weeds of contract arcana — of what our poobahs and satraps are really up to on the far-flung fields of empire. For example, in olden times — when war pork was confined more to vittles and blankets and bullets and such — we might never have

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