[Thread on the question of Hamas] Two things that require some consideration. 1. The demand by the warmongers that people who call for the ceasefire must condemn Hamas. 2. The strange framework adopted by the media that this is an Israel-Hamas war. [Pictures in this thread are by Majd Arandas (1994-2023), a brave Palestinian photographer who captured everyday life in Gaza, where he was born in the Nuseirat refugee camp. Such gentleness destroyed by this ugly Israeli war]

[thread] Dear @IntlCrimCourt - waiting for you to draft arrest warrants against @netanyahu. So quick to do a warrant against Putin for removing 6000 children from the war zone to Russia, but now won't file a warrant against a man responsible for killing 6000 Palestinian children. The Rome Statute (2002) upon which you are based is quite clear about the crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide. Any brief glance at the Statute and the evidence suggests you should have filed a warrant already. Your credibility hangs on a thread.

[thread] Israel claims, after killing around 10,000 Palestinians, that it has killed 'dozens' of Hamas militants (). What is the formula for civilians to militants as far as the @IDF and @netanyahu are concerned?cnn.com/middleeast/liv… By saying that they have killed dozens of Hamas militants - their purported target - and having at the same time killed thousands of Palestinians, they have admitted to the world that their war has resulted in far more civilian deaths than combatant deaths. This is on the record.

An occupying power (Israel) does not have the right to defend itself against those whom it is occupying (Palestinians).
International law requires the occupier to follow the Geneva Conventions. Western governments don’t seem to grasp this - so, @POTUS, @RishiSunak, @JustinTrudeau, @Bundeskanzler, @EmmanuelMacron, stop saying that Israel has a ‘right’ to defend itself. Israel is the occupying power here.

[Thread] The absurd @WSJ publishes a story with a fantasy Cold War headline: wsj.com/articles/cuba-…. There are no sources in this rather ramshackle piece of fiction. Those who might not know this, should learn about Operations Northwoods by the US State that suggested the killing of US citizens by the US as a 'false flag' to initiate hostilities against Cuba. Don't my word for it. Read the government report: nsarchive2.gwu.edu/news/20010430/…

[thread] The latest @tri_continental newsletter resurrects the concept of the Triad (US-Europe-Japan) in order to better explore the structures of contemporary imperialism: thetricontinental.org/newsletterissu…. This concept represents the uneven unity of the bourgeoisies of these zones. The concept 'Triad' was developed by Samir Amin (1931-2018), who used it from 1980 to best explore the way the US bourgeoisie had subordinated the European-Japanese bourgeoisies (hence uneven) but had held them in the same project (hence unity).
Pic: Samir & Sankara.

[thread] ALERT: next week, @tri_continental & @DongshengNews will join with the leading Chinese intellectual journal Wenhua Zongheng to produce the first of four annual international editions of this important journal. We are so happy to let you know about this collaboration. The first issue is called 'On the Threshold of a New International Order', which - after my editorial - has terrific essays by Yang Ping (editor, Wenhua Zongheng), Yao Zhongqiu (dean, Renmin University, Beijing) & Cheng Yawen (dean, Shanghai International Studies University).

The US government and the financial press keep calling Silicon Valley Bank a 'regional bank' and a 'small bank'. However, it was the 16th largest bank in the United States & the largest depositor in Silicon Valley. It was not a small or regional bank. Credit Suisse, of course, was neither a small bank nor a regional bank, but a bank that never recovered from the Great Financial Crisis, from the turbulence of financial capital, and from the underbelly of corruption and fraud.

At the Munich Security Conference, Brazil's foreign minister Mauro Vieira (@ItamaratyGovBr) said that the Ukraine war was a 'very sad situation', and then: 'It’s been one year now. We have to try to build the possibility of a solution. We cannot keep talking only of war'. Colombia's Vice President @FranciaMarquezM expressed her frustration with the focus on the war in Ukraine. 'We don't want to go on discussing who will be the winner or the loser of a war. We are all losers and, in the end, it is humankind that loses everything'.

Fifteen years ago, I published The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (@thenewpress), recently republished in a new edition (thenewpress.com/books/darker-n…). This book was written out of frustration and in hope. Grateful to Against the Grain for republishing extracts from the long interview I gave to CS Soong in 2007 when the book first came out. It lays out the logic of the book, and a little on why I wrote it in the first place:
kpfa.org/episode/agains…

[thread] In 1959, Pilar and Rogelio García had a visit from Antonio Nuñez Jiménez, the great speleologist and communist, in their home in the impoverished area of Soplillar in the Cuban province of Matanzas. He asked if Fidel could come and eat Christmas dinner with them. They were overjoyed. Fidel arrived later with Pedro Miret and Celia Sánchez. Pilar and Rogelio were charcoal makers, as were most of those who lived in this area alongside the Bay of Pigs. Their home was a shack of two rooms with a dirt floor and a guano leaf roof.

Meanwhile, the US military has unveiled its B-21 as a long-range stealth bomber ($692 million per plane), which can carry the GBU-57/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) - remember the Mother of All Bombs. ....for comparison: the US State Department budget will be about $60 billion (about the same as the budget for food stamps, SNAP).
$1 trillion for war.
$60 billion for diplomacy.

[Thread] The Western warrior states are addicted to warfare, unable to pivot away from using military force to settle disputes, vigorous in their self-understanding that other forces - commerce, for instance - do not provide them with sufficient guarantee of domination. The test of this is the US military budget, which is now - officially - set at $858 billion - stunningly it was $45 billion more than requested by Biden. This is an undercount, since it does not include the sections on nuclear weapons held by the Department of Energy.

[thread] Here is a classic exercise in Disinformation, conducted by the US government through the Washington Post. An article appears that has the following headline: U.S. privately asks Ukraine to show it’s open to negotiate with Russia. It misleads the reader. One might believe that Washington is trying to push Kyiv to negotiations. But that is precisely what is not being said in the article, the authors cleverly making this clear in paragraph two, which deserves close reading:

[Thread] In 1975, Walter Rodney wrote that those who dismissed Marxism as Eurocentric did not understand that it had been 'utilised, internalised, domesticated in large parts of the world that are not European'. This insight is key to the Marxism of National Liberation. Thus far, in this project, I have produced two books of selections (Selected Lenin and Selected Ho Chi Minh). The point of these selections is to emphasise at least two arguments:

[thread] Russia's war in Ukraine provoked for me a reflection on the status of Eurasia, the massive continent that seems to be in the midst of a major upheaval.
<All pictures in this thread are from the Asian Relations Conference, New Delhi, 1947> The emergence of China after a hundred years of what Chinese intellectuals call a century of humiliation (1839-1949) and the return of Russia after decades of retreat (1991-2010) have provoked in the United States a serious crisis about its role as the major world power.

Anthropologists from the United States and their work for the @CIA or their ideological ties to US imperialism. Much of it has been in the public record for decades, many books and articles about the close ties between these scholars and the spooks. Here's a doc on Margaret Mead: It was ugly when I first saw @nils_gilman note that Clifford Geertz told him (1998), 'As far as I was concerned, Suharto saved the country'. That's 30 years after it was already clear that the US-Australian backed coup of Suharto resulted in mass murder of 1 million communists.

[thread] Recently the Saraswathi Vidyalaya PU College in Udupi celebrated the academic achievements of 4 young women who wore hijabs. They were celebrated for having done well enough in their exams to earn admission to medical school. 'Hearty congratulations', said the College. Then comes the #HijabBan. Hijab ban? But no ban for caste marks, for turbans, for the kind of uniforms commonly worn by the Prime Minister? The issue here is not right to the hijab, but right to education and right to being treated with dignity.

For your information: I have sent the editors of @thenation a letter regarding what I believe is a false presentation of my views on colonialism, cultural genocide, and other matters. I shall share when/if it appears. Over the past two decades, I have been asked by the editors of @thenation to contribute articles, which I did. Stunning that the editors did not confirm with me what the journalist alleged.

<Public Service Announcement> I spoke to a reporter from @thenation on China, who uses my words in a very malicious way. He suggests that I believe that "cultural genocide" in general is a fallacious idea. This is utterly untrue. For the past thirty years, I have written about the malicious impact of colonialism - including settler colonialism - in various parts of the world, from as far back as the European conquest of the Americas to the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

[Thread] A dangerous situation is afoot in the Solomon Islands. A coup is on, with the government of @ManassehSogava1 is threatened with overthrow by a revolt in Malaita (pushed by the United States and Australia). Not much is being remarked about these developments. Australian troops have arrived in Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands. PM @ScottMorrisonMP says that they will be there only for "weeks." We shall see. This intervention has been planned for years, since Solomon Islands recognized Beijing over Taipei in September 2019.