This is the Doomsday Clock set up by the Organisation of Atomic Scientists, to show graphically how close the world is to nuclear omnicide. It used to be five minutes to midnight, and I remember the New Cold War of the 1980s, when Thatcher and Reagan nearly started a nuclear conflict. As did a computer malfunction over on the Soviet side. The only way we served that is because of an heroic Red Army officer, who insisted on visual confirmation because he correctly didn’t trust machines. The man was reduced to a nervous wreck afterwards, but he’s a hero. He saved the world.
Now we’ve moved closer to full-scale nuclear war. The scientists blame Trump, his stupid remarks on Twitter, and his sparring and provocation of Kim Jong-Un.
The man’s a menace. For the safety of all humanity, and our beautiful planet, he has to go. Now.
This is a short video from RT of a peace rally that is going on in South Korea ahead of Donald Trump’s visit to that country. It’s quite a colourful occasion. The demonstrators hold up placards in both English and Korean. The slogans in English include ‘No Trump, No War’, ‘Trump, Shut Up’, ‘No Trump, No Racism’ and ‘Peace Please’. There’s a group of drummers there, and at one point there’s also a group of young women wearing candle costumes with their heads enfolded in hats representing flames. There’s also a big screen, which shows footage of Trump threatening to destroy North Korea utterly, with subtitles, which gets a gasp of very strong disapproval from the crowd.
I really am not at all surprised that the people of South Korea are demonstrating against Trump and his threats of starting a war with Kim Jong-Un. North and South Korea used to be parts of the same country, after all, even if the North is under a brutal, Stalinist dictatorship. And if Trump does start a war with North Korea, it’ll be the South and Japan which stand the most chance of being incinerated in the ensuing holocaust.
I found these three posters in the art book, The Soviet Political Poster 1917-1987 and was struck by their continued relevance to events today. The book is a collection of Soviet political posters from the Bolshevik coup of 1917 to the time the book was published in the mid-1980s, taken from the Lenin library. In many ways it’s an art-historical chronicle of the great events that shaped the Soviet Union, from the Revolution, through the Civil War, collectivisation and industrialisation, the Nazi invasion, nuclear tensions of the Cold War, Gagarin’s epoch-making spaceflight and then on to the years of stagnation under Brezhnev.
Two of the posters below were part of a number produced to mark the 20th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, which the Russians called the ‘Great Patriotic War’. Their message against war is simple and eternal, using the images of a woman and child in one, and a small child in the other, to get the message across.
The Russian behind the little girl reads simply ‘Don’t Need War’.
The slogan in this poster says ‘Not For Wars’.
This last poster is less anti-war, than anti-nuclear testing. Nevertheless, it was painted in 1958 during the Cold War, when the West and the Communist bloc faced each other amid an intense atmosphere of distrust and hostility, and it seemed that nuclear Armageddon could come at any moment. This is the background to the formation of groups in the West like CND. The Russian is a simple cry of ‘No!’
I realise that there’s an element of hypocrisy in these posters, as the Soviet Union was a military superpower, which used its armed forces to dominate its satellites in eastern Europe, and was intent on developing its own nuclear arsenal.
But I wanted to put these images up because of their powerful message now, when our political leaders seem to be intent on driving us towards another useless, dangerous Cold War with Russia, and Trump and Kim Jong-Un, the madman in charge of North Korea, have been threatening each other with their nuclear and conventional weapons over in the Pacific.
In the case of Kim Jong-In, he’s simply the latest scion of a family of brutal ‘Stalinist’ dictators, who hang on to power through terror and mass arrest. In the case of Trump and the western politicians, the new Cold War is another attempt to isolate and weaken Russia on the geopolitical stage, provide a reason for giving more massive government contracts to the arms manufacturers, and in the case of Killary and the corporatist Democrats, divert attention away from their own very corrupt dealings with Putin’s Russia abroad, and Wall Street and big business at home.
America’s wars in the Middle East are killing hundreds of thousands, and have displaced many millions more. They have reduced secular Arab nations to ruins, and created legions of Islamist militants and sectarian death squads, who kill, maim, butcher and enslave in their turn. And now Trump seems intent on forcing some kind of confrontation with Iran.
And so we still need to hear these posters’ vital message, whatever we think of Russia’s Communist past.
During the Cold War of the 1980s, Sting sang ‘Do the Russians love their children too?’ The answer from these posters is clearly ‘Yes’. Just as the Arabs and Iranians do.
More Tory hypocrisy revealed by Mike over at Vox Political. Theresa May in her speech was waffling on about how she went into politics to tackle injustice, claiming it was what she ‘was in this for’. This would be a sick joke anyway. However, the events at her own speech have shown this to be another, empty lie. Simon Brodkin, alias the comedian Lee Nelson, has been arrested following his prank of handing May a P45 and saying that Boris had asked him to give it to her.
Brodkin’s committed no crime of which I’m aware. He was not violent, nor threatening. He was not a threat to security. All he did was play a practical joke. But this is too much for the security obsessed Tories, who’ve had him arrested. My guess he’ll probably be released without charge. The arrest is probably meant to be a warning to others, who might want to disrupt the solemn Tory proceedings.
But it’s a good example of the authoritarianism at the heart of the Tory party, particularly under May. May is not a good public speaker, and during her election campaign she consistently ran away from public meetings. Instead, hers were invitation-only events held behind closed doors. They were extremely stage-managed, but her lickspittles in the Beeb and right-wing press nevertheless tried to present her as a brilliant orator of Ciceronian proportions. Meanwhile, even Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Mendip Pishtaco, has complained about the excessive security and mandatory applause at the Tory conference. He stated that it was ‘unBritish’, and was something more suited to Donald Trump’s America or, more specifically, Kim Jong-Un’s North Korea.
He’s right, but Tory conventions have always been stage-managed. And I rather suspect that if the Young Master took over the Tory party, his objections to its authoritarianism would magically vanish. It seems to me quite likely that under Mogg, Tory conferences would be like those of Communist Party of the Soviet Union under Stalin. There’d be hour-long standing ovations, because the first person to stop clapping the Great Leader would be taken out and shot. Or in the case of the Tories, debagged by a pair of giggling old Etonians.
Mogg himself has voted unquestioningly for Britain to become even more authoritarian. He voted for the expansion of the surveillance state, and I think for the secret courts embraced by the Tories, their Lib Dem enablers, and which were being touted by the Blairites in the Labour party. These are courts where, for reasons of ‘national security’, you can be denied every essential part of what constitutes a fair trial. You may not know who your accuser is, and have vital evidence withheld from you or your lawyer. And instead of justice being seen to be done, the trial will be held behind closed doors away from the public. I’ve said before that it’s like something from Kafka, and the monstrous perversions of the judicial system in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia.
As for the Tories, their party exists to perpetrate gross societal injustice. Under them there has been the largest transfer of wealth upwards from the poor to the rich in post-War Britain. They have consistently voted for cut benefits, and increase indirect taxes, which hurt the poor the most, while giving tax breaks to the increased the already bloated salaries of the upper 25 per cent. And Mogg has been solidly behind this.
One of the cynical remarks about the Tories is the saying, ‘A Tory wants a fairer deal for the rich.’ This is absolutely true. And everything they’ve done since Thatcher, including May’s own government, is for this purpose. And what they consider to be a fair deal for the rich, is a massive injustice for the rest of us. Get them out.
Trump’s extremely belligerent speech this morning threatening the North Koreans, and Iran and Venezuela, for that matter, with utter destruction is terrifying. It’s the ranting of a lunatic, who seems determined to push his country, and the world, to the brink of nuclear war. After all, when he first got into power he asked his general staff why America didn’t use its nuclear weapons on its enemies.
Trump is, however, responding to claims by the North Korea itself to have developed a hydrogen bomb and the missiles capable of delivering one to the US. This comes from an underground nuclear test that North Korea carried out on the 3rd of this month, September 2017. But this report by Sharmini Perez of the Real News argues that their claims of nuclear capability is ‘grossly exaggerated’.
In the video below, Perez interviews Robert Kelley, a member of America’s Atomic Energy Authority, and one of the UN weapons inspectors, who were sent to Iraq and Iran. Kelley makes the point that while North Korea is capable of building an atomic bomb using nuclear fission, it is highly debatable whether it has a hydrogen bomb, which uses nuclear fusion. The explosion, which Pyongyang claimed was a hydrogen bomb, occurred in a large underground cavern. They only have the North Koreans’ word that it was a fusion bomb. It could well have been an ordinary atomic bomb. It will only become clear which of the two the bomb was, when low level radioactive material leaks out of the cavern to be detected from the spy drones overflying the country.
The cavern is also so large, that it’s possible that the bomb that was used was actually to large to fit in the warhead of an ICBM. As for the picture of Kim Jong Un peering at a nuclear bomb, surrounded by various scientists and aides, the weapon shown could also be fake. It looks like a nuclear bomb, but the casing could be turned out by any metalworker’s shop within a few days. Kelley also observes that the device also has mistakes, which would indicate that it’s a mock-up, not a real weapon.
The missiles North Korea has, which it claims will be able to reach America, actually aren’t terribly convincing as weapons either. There’s a reason why North Korea has launched them straight into the air during tests: that’s the only way they can monitor their progress. The missile they launched that flew over Japan carried on for another 1,000 miles before disintegrating over the Pacific. But the North Koreans themselves had no way to monitor its progress, and only knew that it had because the Americans had, and had told them. They also don’t seem to have any real ability to guide the missile, so that if they did launch one in America’s direction, it could easily miss and hit Canada to the north or Mexico to the south.
Kelley states that while the country doesn’t appear to have a missile with a nuclear warhead capable of hitting America now, that doesn’t mean he isn’t worried that they could develop one. But for the present, they don’t seem to. He also explains the work of the two international atomic energy authorities, which have the task of monitoring the trade and use of nuclear materials.
The video also begins with a speech by Vladimir Putin expressing sentiments, which I’m sure the readers of this blog totally share: that the proper response to North Korea’s threats about nuclear weapons should be diplomacy, a view which Sharmini Perez also states at the end of the video.
Looking at this, it seems that Trump is threatening to start of another bloody war, if not a nuclear assault, because of a threat which seems to be mostly boasting by the Pyongyang dictator. Which doesn’t inspire confidence in him. He’s dangerously unstable, and should never have been given control of America’s nuclear arsenal. Perhaps it’s time he was ousted on medical grounds, before he can turn the world into a charred, nuclear cinder.
This is a very short video from RT’s Redacted Tonight, presented by the left-wing comedian Lee Camp. Camp shows how Trump is lying to America and the world, in order to bring us closer to war with both of these countries. Trump has said this week that he could declare war with Iran over its failure to keep to the agreement regarding its nuclear programme. Except that, according to the Intercept, UN weapons inspectors have found that Iran has kept to the agreement.
Americans have also been told that North Korea is unwilling to negotiate over its nuclear weapons. Except that the North Koreans have said they’re unwilling to negotiate getting rid of theirs, unless America ends its hostile stance and military threat to them.
Which as Camp points out, means that they are willing to negotiate.
Others have pointed out that the real reason Trump wants a war with Iran is that, while the country certainly is abiding by the treaty limiting its nuclear capability, it is still supplying arms and other aid to groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon, Assad in Syria and the Shi’a in Iraq. In other words, America’s geopolitical enemies. But they have not violated the international treaty regulating their development of nuclear power, so that shouldn’t be an issue Trump can use for pushing America into another devastating war in the Middle East.
As for the North Koreans, while I don’t trust them, and Kim Jong Un really is a murderous b*stard, with the same taste for killing his family as the most degenerate Roman emperors, past experience with other nations has taught him he can’t trust America if he gives up his nuclear weapons. Saddam Hussein did, and the US invaded anyway.
This looks very much like the American military-industrial complex trying to start yet another series of wars, including one that could very easily set off nuclear Armageddon. In Iran’s case, Trump seems simply to be following the policy set by the Likudniks in Israel and the Neo-Cons in the US. They wanted to overthrow the governments of seven nations, including Iraq, Libya, Syria and Iran.
As for Israel itself, Tony Greenstein on his blog has posted a piece discussing how no-one wants to discuss the real elephant in the room: Israel’s own nuclear weapons. Israel isn’t supposed to have any, but they do. Nobody has held them to account for breaking the international treaty, and officially the Israel’s don’t have them. But in practice, everyone knows that they do.
I still remember the uproar back in the 1990s when Mordechai Vanunu leaked the information to the international press that Israel had broken the treaty and produced nuclear weapons. He was prosecuted and imprisoned for a very long time. And it seemed shortly thereafter that Robert Maxwell, the obese fraudster, who owned the Mirror, one of the British papers which I think broke the news, fell off his yacht. Of course, I might be wrong about all of this. Maxwell was probably up to his ears in international intrigue, but at the moment it seems that his death was just an accident.
Hmmm….
But back to Greenstein’s article, one of the very interesting things he says there is that a few decades ago one of the Middle Eastern countries did propose a plan for a nuclear-free Middle East. This would have made the world a much safer place.
And the country that put forward this proposal was Iran. Now unfairly accused of building nuclear weapons.
Which bears out in spades what Lee Camp has said about Iran and North Korea. We’re being lied to about them and their supposed nuclear ambitions. And in the case of Iran, they’ve been lying to us for a very long time.
Both of these countries are extremely repressive states, though Iran is more democratic and freer than North Korea. Indeed, according to the book on the country written by the veteran BBC correspondent, John Simpson, Iranians often said things to him about their government, which made him fear for their safety. When he asked them about it, they’d respond with ‘Why not? This isn’t Russia.’ But those countries’ lack of freedom isn’t why the Orange Generalissimo is spoiling for another war with them.
General Smedley Butler was right: war Is a racket. And the western military machine want to be the gangsters that run it.
At last, after the mindless, terrifying posturing of Trump and Kim Jong In, there’s a bit of common sense in this latest nuclear crisis. A group of Democrat politicos, including Mark Lew, are demanding a change in legislation that would strip the American president of his current power to launch a nuclear attack without Congress’ authorization. This piece of legislation is currently backed by 50,000 signatures from the American public. A previous version of the law was signed by 500,000 people.
In this clip from The Ring of the Fire, the front man not only welcomes this piece of legislation, which would restrain Trump as someone too dangerously unstable to have this power, but asks why it was never passed before. All the past presidents, including Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan and George Dubya, had the power to launch a nuclear missile somewhere without having to seek Congress’ approval. This means that they could destroy a region anywhere, and leave it uninhabitable for 30 years. The presenter makes the point that no-one should power.
He’s absolutely right. The British comics writer and creator, Pat Mills, made a similar point back in an edition of Diceman, a comic whose strips were all Role-Playing Games. In one of these, the reader played Ronald Reagan, who had to go back in time to undo the series of events which were about to start a nuclear war with the former Soviet Union. Mills wrote in the notes to the game a piece detailing how little operational machinery there was in place to check a president’s decision to launch a nuclear attack, or halt hostilities once they had began. These procedures were so few that, if America had been on the brink of a nuclear to the point where the president had gone aboard Airforce 1 to escape an attack on the White House, his chance of contacting the Russian premier to negotiate a peace and pull back from Armageddon would depend literally on a three mile length of wire dangling from the aircraft as an emergency aerial.
And this was under Reagan, whose rhetoric and conduct towards the USSR and Communism was especially belligerent. He nearly started a nuclear holocaust himself with that stupid joke he made at a Republican rally. He stood in front of the cheering crowd, and declared that ‘Congressed has passed legislation outlawing the Soviet Union. Bombing begins in five minutes’. A little while later, the Observer reported under the headline, ‘Nearly the Last Laugh of All’, that after Reagan made that stupid joke, one of the Soviet nuclear bases in Siberia went on red alert for half an hour before standing down.
We can’t have the power to start a nuclear war, and turn this planet into a lifeless cinder, unilaterally held by the President, without a comprehensive system of check. It shouldn’t be held by Reagan, Barack Obama or Clinton, let alone a pratt like Trump.
I have a feeling that the system may have been set up the way it has been for swiftness of response. If Russia had fired nuclear missiles at America, the president could have launched a rapid counterattack in the precious last few minutes the country still existed, instead of seeking Congressional approval.
But the Americans discussing abandoning their ‘no strike first’ policy, removing this power from the presidency is a small price to pay for increased global security.
It’s also similar to a proposal in Britain to strip the Prime Minister of the right to start a war without the consent of parliament. This is precisely what Blair and his cronies did when they joined Bush in the invasion of Iraq. Looking through Waterstone’s shelves the other month, I saw a book by a British general arguing against the proposal, on the grounds that it would hinder Britain’s ability to wage war.
A fair reply to this argument would be ‘Good.’
The Iraq invasion was an illegal act of aggression, launched on a tissue of lies that Saddam Hussein was planning another attack, and had weapons of mass destruction. He wasn’t and didn’t. The result has been the destruction of one of the richest, most secular nations in the Middle East, the devastation of its priceless antiquities, and millions dead, wounded and displaced not only in Iraq itself but across the Middle East.
It plunged the country into a vicious, sectarian civil war, in which the American occupying forces gave material aid and sanction to Shia death squads, while the mercenaries employed by the West ran completely out of control. These private military contractors were responsible for prostitution to murder, sometimes just killing ordinary Iraqis and Arabs just for kicks.
There is a very strong case for hauling Blair, Bush and the other warmongers up before the Hague as war criminals. This has been tried by British, Canadian and Greek lawyers, but American pressure on the Hague War Crimes Tribunal put a stop to it. And a few weeks ago a British court also ruled that Blair could not be indicted as the war criminal he is.
Considering the horror Blair unleashed through his decision to go to war, against the wishes of over a million ordinary Brits, who marched against it – Christian, Muslim, atheist, whatever, then it’s only too right that the Prime Minister should have to call parliament before they declare war.
Over the past week the major news issue has been about Trump and North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong Un, ratcheting up the tension that could easily lead to a nuclear war. The North Koreans have test fired another missile, which is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, and have threated to hit the island of Guam, on which America has a military base. In return, Trump has vowed to retaliate ‘with fire and fury, such as the world has never seen.’
This is terrifyingly like some of the Cold War rhetoric I grew up under in the 1980s, when the spectre of a global nuclear holocaust was all too real. It was also completely unnecessary, a product of Reagan and Thatcher’s militant posturing and determination to spread capitalism around the globe, no matter what the dangers. All while pretending to be the champions of political freedom.
In this clip from The Jimmy Dore Show, the American comedian and his guests Ron Placone and Steffi Zamorano, the Miserable Liberal, comment on a very revealing piece on another liberal internet news channel, Democracy Now. They interviewed the respected academic linguist and veteran critic of American militarism and capitalism, Noam Chomsky. Chomsky revealed that two years ago, the North Koreans offered to make a peace deal with Barack Obama. They would freeze their nuclear programme. In return, they wanted the Americans to stop conducting manoeuvres close to their borders, including flights by B52 bombers, which are capable of carrying nuclear bombs.
Obama refused.
Which, they comment, kind of makes America look like the aggressor. Dore makes the point that during the Korean War, the country was literally flattened by American bombing, so that there were no targets left. A million people were killed. And the North Koreans have very long memories.
Obama’s refusal of the peace offer by the North Koreans, and this latest jingoistic saber-rattling by Trump, also shows that it doesn’t matter who’s in the White House, the military-industrial complex gets its way anyway.
They also comment on the complicity of the American media in promoting a possible war. There are no journalists working for MSNBC, or writing for the New York Times or Washington Post, advocating peace. No Hans Blix, the UN weapons inspector, who told George Dubya what he really didn’t want to hear: that Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. And no Phil Donohue either, who was sacked because he also spoke out against the war in Iraq. And the New York Times also sacked one of its journos for writing a piece arguing against the invasion of Iraq.
Dore makes the point that this piece needs to go viral, and be reblogged, because you aren’t going to read it or hear about it in the mainstream news. Or if you do, it’ll be on page 88, after a long piece demanding America go to war.
There’s no doubt that Kim Jong Un is a psychopathic dictator, a Stalinist autocrat with the taste for murdering his own family of a Roman emperor. This doesn’t change the fact that this episode, and the horrifying possibility of nuclear war, could have been avoided.
Just like tensions are being ratcheted up with Iran on the same issue of nuclear weapons, and for apparently the same reasons: the American military-industrial complex and bought politicians want a war with Iran. A war which would have similar devastating consequences for the country and the wider Middle East as the Iraq War.
And this is another piece of news that tarnishes the gilded reputation of Barack Obama. Obama, remember, won the Nobel Peace Prize when he was elected, despite not having done anything. It was enough that he was America’s first Black president, and that great things were expected of him. Once in power, however, his radical critics on the Left have pointed out that he was as centrist and corporatist as his predecessors. And far from being anti-war, he massively expanded American military adventures into a further five nations. And Hillary Clinton, who served him as America’s foreign minister, was responsible for backing another Fascist military coup in Honduras. This installed a right-wing government that has restored power to American corporations, and conducted a reign of terror against trade unionists, indigenous peoples and activists for their rights, and the left wing opposition. Killary was also close friends with Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s close aide, who has been dubbed the greatest unindicted war criminal because of the murderous regimes and atrocities he backed from Pinochet’s coup in Chile, Pakistan’s attacks on Bangladesh during their war of independence, and the Vietnam War.
This is why so many Americans want change, and flocked to Bernie Sanders when he denounced Clinton for her friendship with Kissinger, and said that America should no longer interfere in other countries’ domestic affairs.
And the silence of the press over this – both in America and over here, in Britain, on similar issues, is why we need to support the internet and left-wing news shows like Dore’s and Democracy Now, as well as independent bloggers like Mike, despite attempts by Google and Facebook to close them down by denying them an audience.
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