World Analysis Newswire Archive

A weekly 30 minute review of news and opinion, recorded from a shortwave radio. With times and freqs for listening at home. 2 files- broadcast and slow-modem streaming. Free to rebroadcast. China, Netherlands, Cuba, and Russia.

The current imperial slaughter in the Middle East, justified by the "Global War on Terror", that has resulted in at least 600,000 deaths in Iraq, is nothing new — the U.S. Empire has a long and sordid history of genocidal mass murder.

The history of the US imperialism and Empire is the subject of a series of ten monthly seminars from Dr John Marciano, "Empire as a Way of Life". Attached is a recording of the eighth of these seminars and the text upon which it was based. The first 9 of these seminars have taken place and the intention is to have the whole series published on this site; the last one will take place on 19th June.

This seminar, recorded on 17th April 2007 by the L.A. Sound Posse, runs for 39 minutes and includes the discussion following. It has been made available under a Creative Commons license. If this recording is broadcast please let the L.A. Sound Posse know. This recording was originally made available on the A-Infos Radio Project site.

The following text has been reproduced here with the kind permission of Dr John Marciano and he can be contacted at johnmarciano@mac.com. He introduced this series of seminars in the following way:

A fundamental purpose of our meetings is to understand the systemic nature of the U.S. Empire and the economic and military imperialism that is its lifeblood. The historian William Appleman Williams argues that empire became "a way of life" in the U.S., a "combination of patterns of thought and action that, as it becomes habitual and institutionalized, defines the thrust and character of a culture and society." This "way of life" has convinced many U.S. "Americans" they have a right or "manifest destiny" to impose their political and economic policies upon others.

Dr John Marciano is Professor Emeritus, State University of New York at Cortland, where he taught courses on social and historical foundations of education and class, gender and race.

Previous parts of this series:

• Empire as a Way of Life, Part 1 | mp3 | doc
• Empire as a Way of Life, Part 2 | mp3 | doc
• Empire as a Way of Life, Part 3 | mp3 | doc
• Empire as a Way of Life, Part 4 | mp3 | doc
• Empire as a Way of Life, Part 5 | mp3 | doc
• Empire as a Way of Life, Part 6 | mp3 | doc
• Empire as a Way of Life, Part 7 | mp3 | doc

At a committal hearing earlier this year, it was alleged that police went on a fishing expedition of a few suburbs to find alleged material you'd pick up at the shops or on the internet.

The infamous Balibo murders perfectly illustrate Australian cowardice and Indonesian barbarity. It should be stated from the outset that the truth of the cold-blooded murder of the Balibo five has been known since the day of the crime in 1975. The cringing attitude displayed by successive Australian governments toward the barbaric Indonesians has made Australia a laughing stock in Asia. All successive Labor and Liberal governments that perpetuated the lie of a tragic accident (caught in a cross-fire) are guilty of criminal suppression of the truth and criminal collusion with the murderers -- grubby oil deals notwithstanding.

President Bush Tuesday announced that his administration is imposing a fresh set of economic sanctions on Sudan, claiming the measures are designed to pressure the government in Khartoum to halt the bloodshed in the country’s western-most province of Darfur.

US forces continued to deny basic rights to some of around 500 detainees at its Bagram base accused of links with the Taliban and Al Qaeda, Amnesty noted, and the Afghan security forces—to whom US/NATO forces routinely hand over detainees—were “accused of illegal detentions and torture and other ill-treatment.” Meanwhile local officials/commanders, some of whom ran their own prisons, were never held accountable for their actions, Amnesty said.

Like paranoid schizophrenic neglecting his meds, Senator John McCain tells us Osama will get us if the United States pulls out of Iraq.

Bush supporters, soon enough to lend support to McCain, Guiliani, or Romney, are so inculcated with impossible and fantastic Brothers Grimm stories about turban-wearing terrorists they have completely surrendered their higher reasoning faculties, that is if they had any to begin with.

" ... under the sky
without hope
the self inside me dies ...

I will always be from nowhere
Without a face, without a history
from nowhere."

"Traveler without Luggage" by Abdul-Wahab Al-Bayyati

Why is a Northern Hemisphere nation, JAPAN, permitted to flagrantly slaughter whales in Southern Hemisphere waters? Perhaps widespread inaction in the face of blatant Japanese smugness, arrogance, contempt for the environment, the International Whaling Commission and other nations is related to the world’s toleration of criminal wars resulting in hundreds of thousands of innocent human casualties! What chance do whales have if innocent HUMAN BEINGS are treated as expendable?

We declare war on the leaders of the world...

In raising the ante in Iraq, Lebanon, the West Bank and the Gaza by again raising the empty spectre of ‘al Qaeda’ in order to get at Iran, Syria and Hizbollah, the US and the Israelis have exposed their hand about the myth of ‘al Qaeda terrorism’ in the Middle East.

US President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have all personally warned Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that time is running out. Deadlines have gone or are fast approaching. Still, the Bush administration is no closer to achieving the “benchmarks” it demanded of the Iraqi government on January 10 and linked to the success of its current military “surge”.

Bush is an apocalyptic person. I observe his eyes, his face and his obsessive preoccupation with pretending that everything he sees on the "invisible screens" are spontaneous thoughts...

The BBC is bragging to the world today [UK ‘bank holiday’ Monday 28 May 2007] about its allegedly exclusive interview with the G W Bush-backed 'World Bank’ president, the soon-to-retire Paul Wolfowitz.

The goal of the transnational corporation is to become truly transnational, poised above the sovereign power of any particu­lar nation, while being served by the sovereign powers of all nations. Cyril Siewert, chief financial officer of Colgate Palmol­ive Company, could have been speaking for all transnationals when he remarked, “The United States doesn’t have an automatic call on our [corporation’s] resources. There is no mindset that puts this country first.”[i]

On May 22, 2007, Washington’s Democrats obediently capitulated to the Bush administration, handing Bush a war spending bill completely stripped of conditions that would, in any way, slow the administration’s relentless Middle East conflagration. In fact, the new bill is an even more egregious blank check for a massive “surge” of Bush administration violence throughout the region, opening the door for a war with Iran. New Iraq “benchmarks” pushed by the Democrats themselves will result in new atrocities and more bloodshed, funded by the Democrats themselves.

It is no mere coincidence that fighting has broken out in Lebanon between Fatah Al-Islam, a previously unheard of radical militant group, and the Lebanese Armed Forces, days after David Welch, the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs at the U.S. State Department, held unprecedented meetings with General Michel Sulaiman (Solomon) the Commander of the Lebanese Armed Forces. Although Saudi Arabian, Jordanian, and American channels created Fatah Al-Islam, Syria is conveniently being blamed as the perpetrator in a calculated move to strengthen the manufactured war dossier against Damascus.

Fed up of the garbage with which their mainstream media force-feeds them, North American as well as readers all over the world have turned to newspapers like the UK's Guardian in the hope of finding informed, intelligent reporting of world events. They will be disappointed. Today's Guardian is as much part of an Orwellian, Atlanticist, warmongering propaganda campaign as is the disgraceful New York Times.

US military spokesmen have been trying to push implausible articles about Shiite Iran supporting Sunni insurgents for a couple of years now, and with virtually the sole exception of the New York Times, no one in the journalistic community has taken these wild charges seriously. But The Guardian? Yes, the Guardian. Cole is rightly dismissive of "this silly article," but its silliness, its credulous stupidity, doesn't mean it can't have serious and sinister ramifications. Just as the New York Times was used to "launder" the Bushists' warmongering propaganda on Iraq into "straight news" -- from the leader of the "liberal media," no less! -- so too the Guardian makes an ideal patsy for fomenting war fever against Iran. On Iraq, Bush and Cheney solemnly cited the scary stories their own minions had planted in the Times, now they can refer to the stories in Guardian as proof of the reality of Iran's "acts of war" against the United States. In fact, the Guardian's reputation as a left-wing, even "socialist" paper makes it even more effective in this regard.

World cereal production is on track to reach a record level in 2007. In spite of this, supplies will be barely adequate to meet increased demand, boosted by the development of the biofuels industry...