Kourosh Ziabari

Since its very inception in 1946, the United Nations Security Council demonstrated that it cannot be trusted as a podium of justice for the world countries, specially the oppressed and defenseless nations which eye the assistance and patronage of the powerful and economically influential nations for tackling their political predicaments and crises, and showed that it merely pursues the interests of its small bloc of five permanent members and undemocratically discriminates against a multitude of countries who don't have a say in the policies which directly affects them.

United Nations Security Council is said to be one of the principal organs within the operative system of the United Nations and is "allegedly" charged with the maintenance of international peace and security. The authorities possessed by UNSC are the establishment of peacekeeping missions, imposition of international sanctions and authorization of military actions whenever necessary.

UNSC has five permanent members: China, Russia, Britain, France and the United States. What's the reason? Why should the UNSC have permanent members which cannot be removed from power and must wield an unyielding and resolute authority to make decision over the international affairs? The answer is simple: these five countries are the victorious powers of the Second World War. Their victory in a war which took place and was concluded more than half a century ago minimally accounts for the eternality and endlessness of the power which they possess.

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Milo Nickels
Activist Post

Anti-government sentiment is not cause for fear, a sign of insanity, or a precursor of tragedy. Quite the contrary. Anti-government sentiment signifies attentiveness, understanding, and a love of liberty. If you truly value freedom, then you absolutely must distrust and despise government with every fiber of your being. Why? Government has no ability, whatsoever, to give freedom to anyone. Government can only take freedoms away. Our founding fathers fully understood this fundamental truth. They did not view government as a potential source of good, but as a necessary evil. Although they understood that limited government would be necessary to protect individual citizens from each other, they also understood that the Constitution would be necessary to protect all citizens from the government. Our founding fathers knew that if they did not restrain the government with the constitution, then nothing would stop it from taking all of our liberties away. This is simply the nature of the beast.

Many people mistakenly believe that the first Amendment grants us freedom of speech. This is dead wrong. The first amendment tells the government that they are not allowed to take that freedom away. Many people mistakenly believe that the second amendment exists only to protect hunters so that they can feed their families. They are dead wrong once again. Our founding fathers expected our government to overstep its bounds, and the second amendment was intended to be our insurance policy to rise against those encroachments. The second amendment is a direct extension of the Declaration of Independence where it states:

...to secure [our unalienable] rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it...

How do we abolish a government without arms? Our founding fathers were not liberal, government-loving, boot-lickers; they were revolutionaries. They completely and necessarily distrusted the government and hated tyranny. They expected that government would always try to steal freedom, and they expected people to rise up against the government whenever that happens. Indeed, our government was founded on the expectation that it couldn't be trusted.

Look at where we are now. Our government wants to pass laws where we can't speak out against it, wants to limit our second amendment rights, and they use the mainstream media to convince the masses that hating the government makes people crazy. If our founding fathers were alive today, they would be labeled as dangerous, extremist threats to our national security.

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Gareth Porter
Antiwar

"The Pentagon [has] embraced the idea of the “long war” ” a 20-year strategy envisioning the deployment of U.S. troops in dozens of countries, and the Army [has] adopted the idea of “the era of persistent warfare” as its rationale for more budgetary resources."

"The military leadership used its political clout to ensure that U.S. forces would continue to fight in Afghanistan indefinitely, even after the premises of its strategy were shown to have been false."

Fifty years after Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Jan. 17, 1961, speech on the “military-industrial complex,” that threat has morphed into a far more powerful and sinister force than Eisenhower could have imagined. It has become a “permanent war state,” with the power to keep the United States at war continuously for the indefinite future.

But despite their seeming invulnerability, the vested interests behind U.S. militarism have been seriously shaken twice in the past four decades by some combination of public revulsion against a major war, opposition to high military spending, serious concern about the budget deficit, and a change in perception of the external threat. Today, the permanent war state faces the first three of those dangers to its power simultaneously – and in a larger context of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

When Eisenhower warned in this farewell address of the “potential” for the “disastrous rise of misplaced power,” he was referring to the danger that militarist interests would gain control over the country’s national security policy. The only reason it didn’t happen on Ike’s watch is that he stood up to the military and its allies.

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