Kevin Barrett
PressTV

This revolution – the overthrow of the global oligarchy – is the only revolution that matters.

Since the days of President Woodrow Wilson – that is, for roughly 100 years – the USA has been on a self-styled crusade to “make the world safe for democracy.” Colossal wars, hot and cold, were fought against German Kaisers and Führers, Russian communists, and Third World nationalists. The American people were told they were “defending democracy.”

Americans slaughtered 3.5 million Vietnamese, and nearly another million Cambodians, to “defend democracy” in Southeast Asia. They murdered millions of Iraqis through wars and sanctions to “defend democracy” in the Middle East. According to André Vltchek and Noam Chomsky's book On Western Terrorism, the US government has murdered between 55 and 60 million people since World War II in wars and interventions all over the world. If we believe the imperial propagandists, this American Holocaust has been one big defense of democracy.

But now, on the eve of the 100th anniversary of World War I, the US has embarked on a new crusade – to make the world UNSAFE for democracy.

In Ukraine, Venezuela, and Thailand, the US is spending billions of dollars to unconstitutionally eject democratically-elected governments. In Palestine, the US has been trying to overthrow the democratically-elected Hamas government ever since it came to power. In Egypt, the US – under Zionist pressure – recently overthrew the only genuinely democratic government in 5,000 years of recorded history. In Syria, the US insists that the people must not be given the opportunity to re-elect Assad, no matter how many international observers and safeguards ensure honest elections. And in Turkey, the US is undermining the democratically-elected Prime Minister Erdogan in favor of CIA puppet Fethullah Gulen. Taking the long view, the US is working patiently to destroy democracy in Iran, Russia, and Latin America. — Why does the US government hate democracy?

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Stefan Steinberg

US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel stepped up pressure on the Russian government after a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels on Thursday.

“We expect other nations to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and avoid provocative action,” Hagel declared. “That’s why I’m closely watching Russia’s military exercises along the Ukrainian border, which they just announced yesterday.”

Hagel’s warning comes a day after US Secretary of State John Kerry issued his own threat against Russia.

“Any kind of military intervention that would violate the sovereign territorial integrity of Ukraine would be a huge, a grave mistake,” [he told reporters in Washington]. “The territorial integrity of Ukraine needs to be respected.”

Kerry and Hagel’s threats were echoed by German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen before the NATO meeting:

“The situation in Ukraine, especially in Crimea, fills us with great concern. The situation is very confusing and difficult, and it is now important that especially a breakup of Ukraine is prevented and the moderate forces will be strengthened in the country.”

US and European demands that other countries avoid “provocative action” are utterly hypocritical. It is the US and European powers, led by Germany, that have carried out a reckless and provocative policy, working with fascist groups to push Ukraine to the brink of civil war.

Their policy aims to break Ukraine from Russia’s sphere of influence and weaken Russia itself.

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Robert Tracinski

The global warming hysteria is disastrous enough in its intended goal, which is to ban the use of our cheapest and most abundant fuels and force us to limp along on “alternative energy” sources that are insufficient to support an industrial civilization. But along the way, the global warming campaign is already wrecking our science and politics by seeking to establish a dogma that cannot legally be questioned.

The critical point in this campaign is a defamation lawsuit by global warming promoter Michael Mann against Mark Steyn, National Review, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

When the “Climategate” e-mails were leaked five years ago, a lot of us speculated that it could all end up in the courts, given the evidence that climate scientists were pocketing large sums of government money on the basis of a scientific consensus they were manipulating behind the scenes. But it’s typical of our upside-down political and cultural environment that when this issue does reach the courts, it will be in the form of a lawsuit against the climate skeptics.

Steyn and the others are being sued for criticizing Mann’s scientific arguments. In the case of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, for example, they’re being sued for Rand Simberg’s complaint that Mann “has molested and tortured data.” (See a summary of the case here.) Frankly, I’m not sure how I escaped this lawsuit myself. I shall have to review what I have written and see if my language was not sufficiently inflammatory. Perhaps I don’t have pockets deep enough to be worth looting. Or perhaps I’m not a big enough target to be worth intimidating and bankrupting. Note the glee with which the left slavers at the prospect of taking out a prominent voice on the right, with one leftist gloating that “it’s doubtful that National Review could survive” losing the case.

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Yasha Levine

How did Cory Booker end up so close to a right wing cult that promotes deep-rooted racism, violent Islamophobia, medieval positions on abortion, homosexuality, women’s rights and more?

Cory Booker, the Democratic candidate for New Jersey Senator, has been endorsed by the New York Times as the next progressive hope… a younger, more populist version of Barack Obama, a guy who’s not afraid to get down and dirty.

The Times’ op-ed wizards described Booker as a “deeply unconventional politician,” known for “once rushing into a burning house before the fire department arrived— saving a woman and traumatizing his security detail,” and they predicted that he “will be able to use his political star status to fight for the neglected, the powerless, people who are working and people who need to work in New Jersey and nationally.”

Unconventional indeed. But there’s one unconventional side to Booker’s progressivism that has received much less recognition. His political career was launched with the help of the Chabad-Lubavitchers, a rabidly rightwing Hasidic cult that considers its dead Rebbe a messiah and that pushes a regressive right-wing worldview that would horrify Booker’s prog supporters: deep- rooted racism, violent Islamophobia, medieval positions on everything from abortion to homosexuality and women’s rights, and a nasty tendency to normalize sexual abuse and protect serial sexual predators in its ranks.

In the early 1990s, Chabad’s passive-aggressive racism helped trigger a three-day race riot in Brooklyn. Earlier this year, a prominent Chabad rabbi mocked victims of childhood sexual abuse who went public, comparing their sexual abuse to “diarrhea” which is “embarrassing but it’s nobody’s business.”

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Israel Shamir

I am a great fan of Kiev, an affable city of pleasing bourgeois character, with its plentiful small restaurants, clean tree-lined streets, and bonhomie of its beer gardens. A hundred years ago Kiev was predominantly a Russian resort, and some central areas have retained this flavour. Now Kiev is patrolled by armed thugs from the Western Ukraine, by fighters from the neo-Nazi -Right Sector, descendants of Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian Quisling’s troopers, and by their local comrades-in-arms of nationalist persuasion.

After a month of confrontation, President Viktor Yanukovych gave in, signed the EC-prepared surrender and escaped their rough revolutionary justice by the skin of his teeth. The ruling party MPs were beaten and dispersed, the communists almost lynched, the opposition have the parliament all to themselves, and they've appointed new ministers and taken over the Ukraine. The Brown Revolution has won in the Ukraine. This big East European country of fifty million inhabitants has gone the way of Libya. The US and the EU won this round, and pushed Russia back eastwards, just as they intended.

It remains to be seen whether the neo-Nazi thugs who won the battle will agree to surrender the sweet fruits of victory to politicians, who are, God knows, nasty enough. And more importantly, it remains to be seen whether the Russian-speaking East and South East of the country will accept the Brown rule of Kiev, or split off and go their own way, as the people of Israel (so relates the Bible) after King Solomon’s death rebelled against his heir saying “To your tents, o Israel!” and proclaimed independence of their fief (I Kings 12:16). Meanwhile it seems that the Easterners’ desire to preserve Ukrainian state integrity is stronger than their dislike for the victorious Browns. Though they assembled their representatives for what could be a declaration of independence, they did not dare to claim power. These peaceful people have little stamina for strife.

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Pepe Escobar

Anti-government protesters carry an injured man on a stretcher
in Independence Square in Kiev February 20, 2014.

Anyone who believes Washington is deeply enamored of ‘democracy’ in Ukraine must hit eBay, where Saddam Hussein’s WMDs have been found, and are on sale to the highest bidder.

Or pay attention to the non-denial denials of the Obama administration, which swears on a daily basis there’s no ‘proxy war’ or Cold War redux in Ukraine.

In a nutshell; Washington’s bipartisan Ukraine policy has always been anti-Moscow. That implies regime change whenever necessary. As the European Union (EU), geopolitically, is nothing but an annex to NATO, what matters is NATO extending its borders to the Ukraine. Or at least Western Ukraine – which would be a valuable consolation prize.

This is a purely military-centric game – the logic of the whole mechanism ultimately decided in Washington, not in Brussels. It’s about NATO expansion, not ‘democracy’. When neo-con State Department functionary Victoria Nuland had her 15 seconds of fame recently, what she actually meant was “We’re NATO, F**k the EU.” No wonder there will be an urgent NATO Defense Ministers meeting in Brussels on Wednesday, centered on Ukraine.

No one will ever read that in US corporate media – or in academia for that matter. Harvard Professor Francis Boyle talking to Voice of Russia, or Princeton’s Stephen Cohen in a recent article for the Nation, are glaring exceptions.

Every informed analyst knows the mastermind of this ‘policy’, since the 1970s, is Zbigniew ‘The Grand Chessboard’ Brzezinski. Dr. Zbig was US President Barack Obama’s mentor at Columbia and is the Talleyrand of the Obama administration’s foreign policy machine.

He may have softened up a notch recently, arguing that although the US must remain the supreme power across Eurasia, Russia and Turkey must be seduced by the West. Yet his historic Russophobia was never diluted.

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Pavel Dmitriev

Authoritarian aggression: A protester breaks up a manne-
quin on the roof of the burned truck during clashes with
police in central Kiev (Photo: Sergei Grits/AP Photo)

The world community should fully realize that Ukrainian Neo-Nazis have become an instrument of US foreign policy.

The coup in Ukraine has taken place. The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine (Ukrainian Parliament) has voted to set early presidential elections for May 25 and done so in violation of Constitution and established order. The former President escaped from Kiev having betrayed his voters, the party, those who stood on guard of law and order and the people. Kiev and a larger part of Ukraine, including Volyn and Galicia regions, have moved under the control of rebels.

The south-eastern part of Ukraine and the Republic of Crimea, excluding the Dnepropetrovsk region, are still loyal to the Constitution and have actually refused to recognize the new regime. At that, it is unclear how long will the local powers in the country’s south-east be able to keep the situation under control…

The Kharkov (or Kharkiv) local governors’s meeting took place on February 22; the final document vaguely stated loyalty to the Constitution and refused to recognize the rebels’ rule…

The regional councils are only legal power structures in the south-eastern part of Ukraine unconditionally recognized by local population that have authority within the limits of their territories. The fates of the people who counter the coup depend on how decisive and resolute the local powers will be. These are the structures that can organize local population and militia to make it maintain law and order and prevent the attempts to seize local administrative buildings.

Until now, the situation in the south-east has been under local powers’ control. Anti-fascist self-defense formations are actively formed in Donetsk, Kharkov and Lugansk, the population there is adamant in its desire to resist. It’s relatively calm in the autonomous Republic of Crimea. The legal powers are strongly determined to repel the attacks of Bandera movement gangs which spread their activities across the country like cancer metastasis.

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Peter Schwarz

This is Svoboda, the Neo-Nazi group that is doing the fighting
in Ukraine. Svoboda is supported directly by Washington.

The recent events in Ukraine are a warning to the international working class. Under conditions in which workers lack both a perspective and a party to enable them to intervene independently in political events, the situation in Ukraine has developed in an extremely reactionary direction. What had been unthinkable in Europe since the fall of Hitler’s Third Reich in 1945 has come to pass: while the US and Germany ruthlessly and recklessly destabilized the country, fascists became the decisive force on the ground.

The crisis was sparked in November of last year by President Viktor Yanukovych’s refusal to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union. This was unacceptable for Washington and Berlin. As Theo Sommer put it in Die Zeit, the issue at stake was “Where should the EU's eastern boundary, and the western boundary of the Russian sphere of influence, be situated?”

The US and Germany systematically supported the pro-EU opposition, which organized the demonstrations against Yanukovych. In addition to Julia Tymoshenko's Fatherland and Vitali Klitschko's UDAR—two right-wing parties with close ties to the German CDU—the opposition also included the fascist Svoboda party of Oleh Tyahnybok.

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Stephen Lendman

Events continue fast moving. The Wall Street Journal headlined "White House Backs Political Change in Ukraine," saying:

"The Obama administration Saturday issued a cautiously worded statement about the swift political change in Ukraine, but generally endorsed the parliament's moves to set new presidential elections in May and to remove President Viktor Yanukovych from office."

European officials reacted the same way, said the Journal. They backed the decisions of the parliament and rejected Mr. Yanukovych's allegations of a coup." Britain officially recognized Ukraine's coup d'état regime. Foreign Secretary William Hague said:

"Events in the last 24 hours show the will of Ukrainians to move towards a different future, and ensure that the voices of those who have protested courageously over several months are heard." "We will work closely with our EU partners in support of a new government in Ukraine, as and when that is formed." "In the meantime, it is important that Ukraine's political leaders respond to events calmly and with determination to harness the united efforts of all Ukrainians to work together for a successful future."

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier called the "existing (reinstated 2004) constitutional order the new legal framework for all political decisions." Coup plotters restored it with virtually no debate or public input.

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Xymphora

I've mentioned here before that the 'progressive' American way of regime change - as we've seen in Serbia, Libya, and planned again for Syria - is massive carpet bombing of civilians until the legitimate leader of the country is forced to withdraw simply in order to put an end to the slaughter (of course, the bombing so destabilizes the country that the violence continues for years and years after the 'progressive' genocide stops).

Sometimes, massive carpet bombing campaigns are not an option, and the new development, as we've seen in Ukraine, is hiring mercenary thugs to attack the institutions of government with extreme violence until the legitimate government has to back down rather than kill more civilians in the crossfire of defending itself.

You'll no doubt have noted that Americans of all political stripes are beside themselves with joy at the outcome of completely wrecking all legitimate institutions of government, and any hope for any real democracy in the foreseeable future, in Ukraine. Having armed thugs take over the legislature by violence is the most 'progressive' thing any American can imagine. Many Europeans who also support this might want to consider that the same procedure can, and no doubt will, be used against other countries who get out of line with American geopolitical plans. Moral and decent Ukrainians could do nothing but watch in horror as their country was being destroyed.

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Andre Damon

On Thursday, the Brookings Institution published a report documenting the sharp growth of social inequality in major metropolitan areas throughout the United States. The report’s findings are of vast significance in three respects.

First, the report documents the immense scale of social inequality and the rapidity with which it is growing, even in cities that are supposedly economic success stories.
Secondly, it shows the crushing growth of poverty and economic distress in these cities.
Thirdly, it implies that these conditions are not the result of a passing economic slowdown, but are rather embedded in the economic system and have become permanent facts of life.

According to the study, across the US, a household in the 95th percentile of income earners—that is, at the bottom of the top five percent—in 2012 had an income nine times greater than the a household in the 20th percentile—that is, at the top of the bottom fifth of income earners. But major cities had a much higher level of income inequality. The ratio was 18.8 for Atlanta, 16.6 for San Francisco, 15.7 for Miami, 15.3 for Boston and 13.3 for Washington DC.

The report documents the massive decline in working class incomes that took place between 2007 and 2012. For example, in Indianapolis—hit by a wave of industrial plant closures—the income of a typical household in the 20th percentile fell by $5,800, or more than a quarter, to $16,883. In Jacksonville, Florida the income of a household in this bracket fell by $7,800, or 30 percent, to $17,411.

“A city where the rich are very rich, and the poor very poor, is likely to face many difficulties,” the report states. “It may struggle to maintain mixed-income school environments that produce better outcomes for low-income kids. It may have too narrow a tax base from which to sustainably raise the revenues necessary for essential city services. And it may fail to produce housing and neighborhoods accessible to middle-class workers and families...”

This describes the great majority of American cities and amounts to an admission that the present social order holds no prospect for decent housing, health care or education for the great majority of city dwellers.

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Stephen Lendman

An anti-government protester mans a barricade in Kiev.

A previous article discussed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and fascist opposition leaders agreeing on terms to end street violence. They suggest unconditional surrender.

Events are so fluid it's hard knowing for sure what's coming until they play out. They're unlikely to any time soon. Ukraine is an ongoing story. Strings are pulled in Washington and key EU capitals. Protest leaders are Western puppets. Disparate street elements have ideas of their own.

Yanukovych agreed to hold early presidential and parliamentary election. He'll reinstate Ukraine's 2004 constitution. He'll form a national unity government. These were key protester demands. Parliament approved unconditional amnesty for all detainees facing potential prosecution for street crime violence. Martial law won't be imposed. Or a state of emergency. In return, both sides agreed to refrain from violence. Reports said it continued sporadically in Kiev and other cities.

Disparate elements want more. They want Yanukovych replaced now. They want elections earlier than he proposed. They want new government as soon as possible. They want their will imposed unilaterally. They want Yanukovych tried for crimes against humanity in the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Obama represents predatory Western interests. He wants Ukraine colonized. He wants its resources controlled. He wants them plundered. He wants ordinary Ukrainians exploited. He wants Ukraine made part of NATO. He wants all former Russian republics under US control. His policies risk confrontation with Moscow. Expect Putin to take so much and no more. He won't sacrifice vital Russian interests for Washington. The struggle for Ukraine's soul continues. It remains to be seen how things play out.

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Stephen Lendman

As things now stand, Obama won. EU partners won. Fascist extremists won. Russia lost. So did ordinary Ukrainians. Months of struggling for something better apparently turned out in vain. More on this below. Events remain fast-moving.

Overnight negotiations produced an early Friday morning deal. Talks lasted eight hours. Opposition leaders Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Oleh Tyahnybok and Vitali Klitschko were involved. So were Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, Russian Human Rights ombudsman Vladimir Lukin, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski.

Ukraine's ruling Party of Regions called on

"everyone involved in the confrontation to lay down their arms." "This deed will be your greatest contribution to Ukraine's future," it said. "We should all consolidate around the common goal of restoring peaceful life on our soil." "We should stop this fratricidal war for the sake of peace, for the sake of justice and for the sake of Ukraine's future."

On Thursday, Ukraine's parliament passed a resolution near unanimously. It condemned the use of force against protesters. It prohibits Ukrainian Security Council counterterrorism. Yanukovych expressed willingness to hold early presidential and parliamentary elections later this year. He's amenable to constitutional change before summer. He's willing to form a national unity government in days.

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John W. Whitehead

Paranoia, Surveillance and Military Tactics: Have We Become Enemies of the Government?

“Totalitarian paranoia runs deep in American society, and it now inhabits the highest levels of government… Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, America has succumbed to a form of historical amnesia fed by a culture of fear, militarization and precarity. Relegated to the dustbin of organized forgetting were the long-standing abuses carried out by America’s intelligence agencies and the public’s long-standing distrust of the FBI, government wiretaps and police actions that threatened privacy rights, civil liberties and those freedoms fundamental to a democracy.” ~ Professor Henry Giroux

Relationships are fragile things, none more so than the relationship between a citizen and his government. Unfortunately for the American people, the contract entered into more than 200 years ago has been reduced to little more than a marriage of convenience and fiscal duty, marked by distrust, lying, infidelity, hostility, disillusion, paranoia and domestic abuse on the part of the government officials entrusted with ensuring the citizenry’s safety and happiness.

Don’t believe me? Just take a stroll through your city’s downtown. Spend an afternoon in your local mall. Get in your car and drive to your parents’ house. Catch the next flight to that business conference. While you’re doing so, pay careful attention to how you and your fellow citizens are treated by government officials—the ones whose salaries you are paying.

You might walk past a police officer outfitted in tactical gear, holding an assault rifle, or drive past a police cruiser scanning license plates. There might be a surveillance camera on the street corner tracking your movements. At the airport, you may be put through your paces by government agents who will want to either pat you down or run scans of your body. And each time you make a call or send a text message, your communications will most likely be logged and filed. When you return home, you might find that government agents have been questioning your neighbors about you, as part of a “census” questionnaire. After you retire to sleep, you might find yourself awakened by a SWAT team crashing through your door (you’ll later discover they were at the wrong address), and if you make the mistake of reaching for your eyeglasses, you might find yourself shot by a cop who felt threatened.

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David Swanson
World BEYOND War

Annie Jacobsen's new book is called Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America. It isn't terribly secret anymore, of course, and it was never very intelligent. Jacobsen has added some details, and the U.S. government is still hiding many more. But the basic facts have been available; they're just left out of most U.S. history books, movies, and television programs.

After World War II, the U.S. military hired sixteen hundred former Nazi scientists and doctors, including some of Adolf Hitler's closest collaborators, including men responsible for murder, slavery, and human experimentation, including men convicted of war crimes, men acquitted of war crimes, and men who never stood trial. Some of the Nazis tried at Nuremberg had already been working for the U.S. in either Germany or the U.S. prior to the trials. Some were protected from their past by the U.S. government for years, as they lived and worked in Boston Harbor, Long Island, Maryland, Ohio, Texas, Alabama, and elsewhere, or were flown by the U.S. government to Argentina to protect them from prosecution. Some trial transcripts were classified in their entirety to avoid exposing the pasts of important U.S. scientists. Some of the Nazis brought over were frauds who had passed themselves off as scientists, some of whom subsequently learned their fields while working for the U.S. military.

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Stephen Lendman

Washington bears full responsibility for three months of street protest violence. At issue is toppling Ukraine's democratically elected government.

On Sunday, Ukraine offered amnesty to anti-government protesters. It did so provided they vacated occupied public buildings. An official statement said: Amnesty "comes into force from February 17, 2014 and stipulates that charges against the people having committed offenses will be dropped."

It took effect after protesters met authorities half-way. They left some occupied Kiev buildings. They evacuated others in Lvov, Ivano-Frankovsk and Ternopol. Ukrainian authorities agreed to let OSCE ambassadors control the buildings. Unblocking Grushevsky Street began. Traffic was partly restored. Municipal services began removing debris. Under amnesty agreed on terms, 268 people arrested from December 27 - February 2 were scheduled for release.

National Strategy Institute director for International Projects Yuri Solozobov said authorities prepared to honor their commitment even though opposition elements only partly observed theirs. Amnesty terms required all occupied buildings be vacated. Only four in Kiev were returned to authorities. Only one was an administration building.

Batkivshchina party leader Arseniy Yatsenyuk demanded 2,000 detainees be released. Otherwise protests would continue until "final victory," he said. He and other protest leaders are US stooges. They're self-serving. They represent Washington. They're mindless of what best serves Ukrainians.

Obama wants Ukraine's sovereignty destroyed. He wants a subservient pro-Western government replacing a democratically elected independent one. The battle for Ukraine's soul continues. Washington wants control over all former Soviet republics. It wants them transformed into subservient US satellites. It wants them plundered. It wants them colonized for profit. It wants Russia increasingly isolated and weakened.

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Stephen Lendman

Britain, America and Israel are likeminded. They're rogue states. They're axis of evil partners. They operate ruthlessly. They mock democratic values. They trash rule of law principles. They tolerate no one challenging their lawlessness. They vilify them. They imprison some. They do so to threaten others. Most often they harass. They do it no-holds-barred.

The Government Accountability Project (GAP) calls itself "the nation's leading whistleblower protection and advocacy organization." Jesselyn Radack is a prominent human rights lawyer/whistleblower. She's GAP's National Security & Human Rights director. She's involved mainly with national security and intelligence community whistleblowers. She focuses on torture, lawless surveillance, secrecy and political discrimination.

She represented former senior NSA official Thomas Drake. He won awards for truth-telling and intelligence integrity. On April 15, 2010, he was wrongfully indicted. Obama prosecutors did so under the 1917 Espionage Act. He faced multiple charges. They included willful retention of classified information, obstruction of justice and making false statements. He leaked information on lawless NSA spying. He exposed agency waste, fraud and abuse. He performed a vital public service. He deserved praise, not prosecution. In May 2011, 60 Minutes featured his case.

He was lucky. In early June, Obama's Justice Department dropped all charges. They did so in return for his pleading guilty to a misdemeanor too minor to matter. He got one year probation. He agreed to perform community service.

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Carlos Hernández and Alejandro López

■ A las 7:20 de la mañana, los antidisturbios de la policía municipal de Madrid acordonaron la calle Tribulete (en el barrio madrileño de Lavapiés) para ejecutar el desahucio de Antonio Argobia, enfermo crónico de 54 años con incapacidad total. (Video por Periodismo Humano)
■ 'Lavapiés' is a word that means washing someone's feet and refers of course to beloved Jesus. - Washing someone's feet is symbolic of our role in the body of Christ. As you will understand, what happened in Madrid is the very opposite of what we are supposed to be doing. (Editor)

The brutal consequences of evictions being carried in Spain by the banks in collaboration with the courts and police was evidenced once again recently when Antonio Argobia, a chronically ill and disabled 54-year-old, was thrown out of his home in the working class neighbourhood of Lavapiés in Madrid.

Two weeks ago, in the early morning, police cordoned off the street where Argobia rented an apartment and refused entrance to anyone who could not prove they lived or worked there, attempting to pre-empt an anti-eviction demonstration of the type that has become so common in Spain. Soon after, a group of riot police broke down the door of Argobia’s apartment with a battering ram without any prior negotiation and with minimal warning.

In the apartment were a mediator from a local Stop the Evictions (Stop Desahucios) campaign and two photographers from international news agencies, all of whom were arrested and charged with disobedience for refusing to leave the apartment. Argobia was carried out wearing just his pyjamas and put in a police van.

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Nahida Izzat, Exiled Palestinian
Poetry for Palestine

PLEASE SIGN THIS DECLARATION IF YOU AGREE WITH ITS CONTENTS. [Link since broken. - Ed.]

Palestinian Declaration

An invitation to All Palestinians and their supporters to unite under the banner of LIBERATION, affirming our Inalienable Rights and clarifying our aims and aspirations to ourselves and to the world. For the sake of historical truth, and for defending, preserving and protecting the rights of future Palestinian children, we present this document:

■ Whereas, no foreign government, international institution or individual, has any form of legitimacy or jurisdiction to dispossess any other Nation by distributing their land and property,

■ Whereas, all colonial dealings regarding Palestine, whether by the “League of Nations” or the subsequent land confiscations by British colonial forces, as well as coerced transactions by early Zionists, did not invalidate the irrefutable fact that Palestine is the sole indigenous representative of all people of Palestine, settled and anchored culturally to the land since time immemorial,

■ Whereas, the religious component of Palestine’s cultural heritage is the central heritage for 31% of world population who are Christians, 23 % who are Muslims, and 0.2 % who are Jews. Therefore, Jewish Zionists arguably attempted to usurp and destroy the heritage of almost 55% of humankind, namely Christians and Muslims, contrary to historical Palestinian society, known for its social cohesion, irrespective of religion, and for protecting all monuments and all worshipers of all faiths, prior to the Jewish-zionist invasion,

■ Whereas, we the Palestinian Nation, the sole indigenous people of historic Palestine, had neither been consulted with, nor did we agree to or undersign any partition of our homeland, Palestine, when the UN put partition to the vote in the General Assembly in 1948. The UN has never done so again,

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Peter Symonds

The targeting of governments and individuals by the UN and its associated institutions is invariably highly selective, politically coloured and geared to the predatory interests of the imperialist powers, above all the United States.

The UN report on human rights in North Korea released yesterday marks an acceleration of the US-led campaign to destabilise and ultimately remove the Pyongyang regime. The catalogue of horrors in North Korea is designed to stampede public opinion behind any US provocations directed against Pyongyang, but above all to intensify the pressure on North Korea’s ally, China.

The highly political character of the UN commission of inquiry was underlined by the comments of its chair, former Australian judge Michael Kirby, who declared that the repressive methods of the North Korean regime were “strikingly similar” to the crimes of Nazi Germany. He likened North Korean prisons to the Nazi concentration camps in which millions of Jews, gypsies and political prisoners were exterminated.

Kirby has already written to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, declaring that his commission is recommending that “the international criminal court render accountable all those, including possibly yourself, who may be responsible for the crimes against humanity.” In his comments yesterday, Kirby declared that the purpose of the commission’s report was to “galvanize action on the part of the international community.”

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