Dilip Simeon's blog

NB : The flag of 'freedom and democracy' is wearing a bit thin on Western shoulders. The list of criminal interventions on other countries + nuclear tests in the Pacific + war crimes is very long indeed. Vietnam (1963-75); Iran (1953); Bikini atoll and Marina islands; Chile (1973), Argentina (support of military dictators); wars in Iraq; long standing support for the apartheid regime in South Africa; support for Yahya Khans military genocide in Bangladesh (East Pakistan, 1970-71); the assassination of Mujibur Rehman - these a re just a few of the prominent examples. And their permanent alliance with the brutal Saudi Arabian regime shows that democracy is not exactly on top of their diplomatic agenda. As to the CIA involvement in the global heroin trade , the less said the better. Maybe the freedom to die of heroin addiction is included in the western list of liberties Meanwhile the totalitarian disdain for justice, human rights and truth has been exemplified by the Soviet (and ...

Just one bomb releases a slew of toxic heavy metals into Ukraine’s soil and groundwater. Now multiply this by thousands. In the U.S., proponents supporting military expansion and increasing defense spending have prevailed despite the more pressing need to divert all available resources to fight the impending disaster being faced by humanity: climate change. While ignoring the climate disaster, the U.S. is not only spending to boast its own military powers but also providing Ukraine with weapons and other aid in its ongoing conflict with Russia. With the war in Ukraine raging on, the U.S. Senate voted 86 to 11 in May and gave its approval to President Joe Biden’s massive additional aid package of $40 billion to help Ukraine on top of the nearly $14 billion authorized just two months prior. This total financial aid package for Ukraine of around $54 billion is now almost as large or larger than the entire 2021 defense budgets of several countries: France’s military budget was ...

Over the last 30 years, Russia’s principal strategic goal had been to maintain its quasi-imperial dominance in the post-Soviet space. Not any more. Moscow’s inability to quickly achieve regime change in Kyiv has transformed both the Kremlin’s war aims in Ukraine and the very nature of the Russian state. When Vladimir Putin sent Russian tanks rolling into Ukraine in late February, he still presided over an imperial-like polity largely privileging the methods of indirect rule. Four months later, Russia looks more like an aggrieved and aggressive nationalizing state focused on the ‘gathering of lands’ than a benign, regional hegemon. This dramatic shift will have profound consequences for Russia’s immediate ex-Soviet neighbours, the European Union and the world at large.... https://www.eurozine.com/no-empire-without-end/ Sergei Loznitsa, the Ukrainian film-maker who refuses to be cancelled Don’t cry for me, Dostoevsky Book review: Day of the Oprichnik, 16 Years Later THE CANCELLATIO...

The US has 800 military bases around the world. The rest of the world has 30 outside of its own borders.   Washington learned a hard lesson from the unpopularity of its 2003 attack on Iraq aimed at controlling more of the Middle East’s oil reserves. Ordinary people do not like seeing the public coffers ransacked or suffering years of austerity, simply to line the pockets of Blackwater, Halliburton, and Raytheon. And all the more so when such a war is sold to them on the basis of a huge deception. So since then, the U.S. has been repackaging its neocolonialism via proxy wars that are a much easier sell. There have been a succession of them: Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Venezuela and now Ukraine. Each time, a few more leftists are lured into the camp of the war hawks by the West’s selfless, humanitarian instincts – promoted, of course, through the barrel of a Western-supplied arsenal. That process has reached its nadir with Ukraine.... https://scheerpost.com/2022/06/24/a-lemming-l...

Factoring in the value of human life and ethical considerations in economic and social policy making could bring about change. “To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment… would result in the demolition of society,” warned political economist Karl Polanyi in his book The Great Transformation, published in 1944. Had Polanyi been alive today, his statement would have found prophetic validation in the condition of society in the United States, one of the world’s most dominant economies. For most of the late 20th century, the economy of the United States was built around an industrialised, mass-scaling model of weaponising itself and other nations while designing tools of finance to profit from war. That same economy is now in a situation where its gun industry, guided by the compulsions of less- regulated market forces, is wrecking its own society. On May 24, a mass shooting at a school in Uvalde in Texas , kil...

Waging Nonviolence  - From the brutal war in Ukraine to the devastating school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, aggression and mass atrocities seem to define today’s world. Yet, even as we navigate this trauma and tragedy, there are glimmers of hope to be found in the lesser-known stories of collective action, as people come together in the face of these terrible events. Now more than ever, the world can learn how to challenge violence from those who are organizing for peace. There is perhaps no better example than the mobilization to end the war in Yemen — a country with a rich history and vibrant culture, but one most Americans would struggle to find on a map. For years, a small, close-knit network of organizers led primarily by Yemeni-American women has been driving a major mobilization for peace. Working on shoestring budgets and without much fanfare, they organize rallies, meet with policymakers and lead community events. Many balance their activism with full-time jobs or schoo...

The US has 57 times as many school shootings as other G7 countries combined A man - almost always a man - commonly with no criminal history and no diagnosis of mental illness, armed with a lawfully obtained semiautomatic 'assault' weapon, kills and injures a large number of innocents in a place they imagined to be safe. It happens around the world , but horrifyingly more and more often in the United States, most recently in Uvalde, Texas and Buffalo, New York. To those of us who live in culturally similar nations, but where the availability of lethal weapons is limited, Americans' increasing reliance on guns even in the face of escalating horrors is unfathomable. We live in far less fear of gunfire, and view America's self-inflicted problem with firearms as a symptom of crippling political dysfunction. As each shooting eclipses the last, as fear and ideology trump the evidence once again, it's terrifying to imagine the scale, the sheer enormity of the tipping poi...

The second US mass shooting in 10 days, which left 18 young children and three adults dead at a Texas elementary school on Tuesday, led to an outpouring of disbelief and potent rage at America’s persistent failure to tackle its epidemic of gun violence.... Donald Trump will be addressing a conference held by National Rifle Association (NRA) in Houston, Texas, on Friday. The event will be strictly gun-controlled in ways the NRA and Trump routinely oppose for any other setting. “Guns won’t be allowed in spaces where Donald Trump and NRA executives are speaking,” Watts said , “because someone might try to kill them.”... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/24/texas-school-shooting-uvalde-gun-violence ********************  America's gun culture - in seven charts In 2020 alone, more than 45,000 Americans died at the end of a barrel of a gun, whether by homicide or suicide, more than any other year on record. The figure represents a 25% increase from five years prior, and a 43% ...

More than 70 years ago, Allied victory in the Second World War brought with it a powerful wave of hatred for all things German. Since the end of the war, the Germans repeatedly accepted responsibility for their actions. They made reparations to the Allied nations and lifelong compensation payments to concentration camp survivors. Nevertheless, it took decades for the hatred to subside in countries that had suffered under their occupation. Today, Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine, committed in the name of of ‘denazification’ and ‘protecting Russian speakers’, have inspired many Ukrainians to reject everything Russian: to try to forget the Russian language and erase all Russian classical literature – with its imperial flavour and patronising of conquered peoples – from memory. How and in what form Ukrainian culture will retain its Russian-speaking component will become clear only when the war ends. But the longer the war continues, the more Russian-speaking culture will suffer in Ukrain...

Fascination with the relationship between knowledge and power never dies. In just about every intellectual tradition, in essentially every documented era, the topic bristles through the canon, though the European tradition appears especially fixated upon it. Are the two domains compatible? Are they even distinct? Does the latter corrupt the former? While the philosophical treatments are perhaps the most systematic, it is literary representations that I find most alluring... The prism of Faust appears again and again in commentaries about science during and after World War II, starting from the Manhattan Project to produce nuclear weapons in the United States and the V-2 ballistic missile enterprise in Hitler’s Germany. To be sure, the Faustian language did not appear instantly, but starting in the late 1960s and more intense popular critique of the thermonuclear standoff, it became too common to even provide a cursory list. The conceptual pairing is overdetermined: here we have the mos...

Two Russian journalists working for a popular pro-Kremlin website filled it with anti-war articles on Monday morning in a rare act of dissent as the country celebrated the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany. The articles on Lenta.ru called President  Vladimir Putin  a “pitiful paranoid dictator” and accused him of waging “the bloodiest war of the 21st century”. “We had to do it today. We wanted to remind everyone what our grandfathers really fought for on this beautiful Victory Day – for peace,” said 30-year-old Egor Polyakov, one of the two journalists. During his annual speech in front of 11,000 soldiers in the Kremlin on Monday morning, Putin  sought to justify his invasion of Ukraine , tying the current fighting to the Soviet victory in the second world war. “This is not what Victory Day is about,” Polyakov told the Guardian in an interview. “Ordinary people are dying, peaceful women and children are dying in Ukraine. Given the rhetoric that we have seen, this...

The US and Russia, faded relics of the Cold War, unable to accept their terminal decline, launch futile and self-defeating wars to reclaim their lost imperial power. Blinded by what Barbara Tuchman calls “the bellicose frivolity of senile empires,” we are marching ominously towards war with Russia. How else might we explain Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s public declaration that the US goal is to “weaken Russia” and Joe Biden’s request for another $33 billion in “emergency” military and economic aid (half of what Russia spent on its military in 2021) for Ukraine? The same cabal of generals and politicians that drained the state of trillions of dollars in the debacles in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Somalia and learned nothing from the nightmare of Vietnam, revel in the illusion of their omnipotence. They have no interest in a diplomatic solution. There are billions in profits to be made in arms sales. There is political posturing to be done. There are generals itching to pu...