by DIANA JOHNSTONE

15 June, 2010
Counterpunch.org
Paris, June 12, 2010.

Dear Noam,

It was a long-awaited pleasure for your many friends and admirers to see you in Paris. I know it was tiring, but you mustn’t think you wore out your voice for nothing. I’m afraid you might get such a negative impression from certain media which seemed to have “learned nothing and forgotten nothing”. However, I think that the rude treatment you received from Le Monde in particular merely highlights the importance of your visit and the deep geopolitical significance that Chomsky has in France.

Excuse me for neglecting your primary field, linguistics, in my analysis. I am not qualified to speak about that. But I tend to believe that the animosity you have aroused in certain circles in France may have less to do with linguistics than with your role as the most prominent American critic of US foreign policy. Yes, we know there are many more, but Chomsky is by far the best-known the world over. My own opinion is that this role as virtual symbol of systematic moral criticism of American foreign policy is the fundamental cause of the campaign against you that began over thirty years ago. To my mind the uproar first over Cambodia and then over the defense of Professor Robert Faurisson’s right to express his views freely was essentially a means to the end of discrediting the leading American critic of United States imperialism.

I need to put this argument in context.

The end of the Second World War split Europe between two groups of satellites of the two major victorious powers. The political methods of the Soviet Union made the satellite status of Eastern Europe obvious to everybody, and notably to the citizens of those countries, who were aware of the coercion keeping them in the Communist bloc.

In the West, American wealth, the ready complicity of native ruling classes and the far more sophisticated methods of political persuasion, dramatizing a largely imaginary “Soviet threat”, succeeded in convincing the satellite countries that they were voluntary allies of the United States.

This worked most of the time. There were a very few temporary exceptions. Sweden, never having been conquered or liberated, had moments of fairly genuine independence, notably under Olof Palme (whose timely assassination has brought Sweden gradually into the arms of NATO). In the 1960s, Charles de Gaulle took major steps to regain political independence for France, notably by criticizing the US war in Indochina and seeking to strengthen relations with Third World countries. This drive was shattered by the events of May 1968, and after the fall of de Gaulle, a normalization process got underway to secure US hegemony in France once and for all.

Now, it is precisely because France was the scene of the strongest impulses for independence that the normalization process had to be the most vigorous.

Counter Currents for more

by F. S. AIJAZUDDIN

Only a man with Napoleon’s vision would have seen the potential of linking the Mediterranean with the Red Sea by digging a canal.

During his campaign in Egypt (1798-1801), Napoleon saw a commercial advantage in shortening the trade route to India. A miscalculation by his engineers caused him to abandon the project. Sixty years later, in 1869, his compatriot — engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps — fulfilled Napoleon’s aim by completing that modern marvel: the Suez Canal.

Napoleon once lamented: “If it had not been for the English, I should have been emperor of the East.” Ironically, a century later, the British and the French were co-owners of the Suez Canal. When, in 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, Israel, Britain and France launched a combined military invasion. Israel occupied the Sinai peninsula. Britain and France strafed Egypt and planted boots in the Canal Zone. The US and the USSR condemned the invasion and threatened sanctions. Britain and France, humiliated, had to withdraw.

British prime minister Anthony Eden contended that his action had been “to strengthen the United Nations”. He was demolished by Aneurin Bevan’s retort: “Every burglar… could argue that he was entering the house to train the police.” (Bevan’s remark finds echoes in US President Donald Trump’s foreign policy.)

Gulf states must prepare themselves for the worst.

Since then, the criticality of the Suez Canal has increased greatly. Ships use it to transport “30 per cent of the world’s shipping container volume, 7-10pc of the world’s oil and 8pc of liquefied natural gas [LNG]”. It is as vital as the Panama Canal is, or the Strait of Hormuz has now become.

Panama Canal, like the Suez, is a manmade waterway. It connects the Caribbean Sea with the Pacific Ocean, and joins Panama and the US in an uneasy political union.

The canal remained under US control from 1914 until 1999, when it passed to Panama. In January 2025, President Trump announced America’s intention of recovering control of the Panama Canal, threatening ‘economic and military action against Panama’ to ensure American “economic security”.

On the other side of the globe, the Strait of Hormuz — a natural cul-de-sac — is inordinately vital to world trade. Before the present conflict started, tens of thousands of ships and tankers passed through it, carrying 30pc of global oil trade and 20pc of global LNG. Today, Iran has applied a political stranglehold and choked oil and gas supplies to the world.

How long will this asphyxiation last? It could be days, even years. Remember: following the Israeli-Arab war in 1967, the Suez Canal remained blocked for eight years.

Dawn for more

by PEPE ESCOBAR

China’s dual-track response to the US–Israeli war on Iran reflects a broader geopolitical and economic strategy that stretches from the battlefield to the global financial system.

China is officially responding on two parallel tracks to the Epstein Syndicate – or US-Israeli – war on Iran via a diplomatic spokesman and a military spokesman. 

Translation: China sees the war both as an extreme political/diplomatic tension and a military threat. 

China’s military spokesman, a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) colonel, speaks with metaphors. It was he who said explicitly that the US is “addicted to war”, with only 250 years of History and only 16 years of peace. 

He clearly positions the US as a global threat. And clearly, also as a moral (italics mine) threat.

Chinese President Xi Jinping is firmly focused on establishing a long-lasting connection between Marxism and Confucianism. 

The key contribution of Confucius to political thinking is the precise use of language. Only the one who speaks with precise metaphors and moral weight is able to govern a nation.

So China is carefully developing a steady moral and ethical criticism of the American war of choice on Iran. Stressing how this is the attack of a nation that has lost its moral compass. 

The Global South totally understands the message. 

Additionally, facts on the battlefield show how China has also changed the rules of war in Iran. 

The Iranian grid is now fully connected to the BeiDou satellite system. That explains how Iran now strikes with precision, and every move by the US-Israeli combo faces a China-tech Digital Wall (over 40 BeiDou satellites in orbit). That accounts for excellent Iranian missile accuracy and increased resistance to jamming.

As part of their 25-year Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, China has also supplied Iran with long-range radars, integrated with satellite systems. The key takeaway is Iran’s now much shorter response time compared to the 12-day war.  

Russia has helped on a parallel track, allowing Iran to apply in spades what Russia learned in Ukraine about western systems such as Patriot and IRIS-T. It’s not only about mass-drone saturation tactics; it’s learning the Russian way of coordinating drone swarms with ballistic missile volleys. That’s exactly what’s in – devastating – effect in the latest stages of Operation True Promise IV.  

Playing Go: It’s all about the petroyuan 

Now let’s focus on the crucial Strait of Hormuz gambit. The key move is Iran only allowing transit for oil tankers whose cargo has been settled in petroyuan. No dollars. No euros. Only yuan. 

In fact, China had already started to end the Bretton Woods/petrodollar system in December 2022, when Beijing invited the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) petro-monarchies to trade oil and gas on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. 

Now, couple all of the above with the Chinese 15^th Five-Year-Plan, just discussed and approved in Beijing. 

Talk about an in-depth systemic vision. 

In a quite holistic way, Beijing planners set GDP growth at four percent; the digital economy advancing to 12.5 percent of GDP; green energy solutions at 25 percent; surface water quality at 85 percent; an avalanche of high-value patents; all that and more, equally tabled, with hard targets to be achieved and binding indicators all the way to 2030. 

This means the Chinese are treating economy, energy security, ecology, education, and health care as if they are organs of the same fit body. That is how urbanization fuels productivity: a lot of investment in R&D fuels more and more patents; patents fuel the digital economy; and green energy solutions fuel strategic independence. 

The Cradle for more

by B. R. GOWANI

The ghazal beautifully sung by Naheed Akhtar is from the 1988 Pakistani film Kalay Badal (Black Clouds). It is set to music by Rabbani. The titles of the film listed three poets: Saeed Gilani, Mahsoor, and Mansoor Gohar.

shab-e-gham mujh se mil kar aese royi

shab-e-gham mujh se mil kar aese royi
milA ho jese sadiyoN bAd koi

hameiN apni samajh Ati nahiN khud
hameiN kyA khAk samjhAyegA koi

qareeN manzil pe A ke dam hai TuTA
kahAN A kar meri taqdeer soyi

kuchh aese Aj un ki yAd Ayi
mili ho jese daulat aik khoi

sajA rakhA kafas hai khoonoN par se
ke ab to bijliyAN le Aye koi

shab-e-gham mujh se mil kar aese royi
milA ho jese sadiyoN bAd koi

Translation with notes by B. R. Gowani

The night of grief

meeting me, the night of grief wept
as if someone had met me after centuries <1>

I can’t understand my own self
how could anyone explain me

near my destination I breathed my last
what a place for my fate to fall asleep! <2>

the way he entered my memory today
it was as if I had found lost wealth

the cage is adorned with blood and feathers
now somebody should bring the lightning <3>

meeting me, the night of grief wept
as if someone had met me after centuries

Notes

<1> For the poet, grief is her prevalent state and hence the sarcasm. It’s like friends who met yesterday, are meeting again today in such a way as if yesterday was a long time ago.

<2> It is as if a person forced to leave his country, that was messed up by the IMF and US government, in hope of making his life better, reaches the US border but is killed by Border Patrol, or the case of the tens of thousands of lives lost at sea, before reaching shore. The person seemingly about to achieve his goal, and reach his destiny, departs this world, for the ultimate sleep of the dreamworld.

<3> The bird in the cage struggling to set itself free has bloodied itself with feathers scattered all over. The bird has strived so long for liberty that, now, it is tired. In other words, the poet is done with the world and wants lightning to electrocute his place, including himself, which has become a prison for him, because he couldn’t get from life what he had desired.

B. R. Gowani can be reached brgowani@hotmail.com

by MAHEEN AZMAT

Colonial travelogues and Hindu nationalist narratives have long cast Kashmiri Muslims as perpetual outsiders in their own land.

Kashmir has long occupied a curious space in the European imagination. For centuries, travellers, merchants, and colonial administrators produced narratives that constructed this Himalayan valley as a mythical ‘Paradise of the Indies’ — a land of extraordinary beauty whose inhabitants, strangely, were deemed unworthy of it.

This paradox, celebrating the land while denigrating its people, did not die with colonialism. It found new life in the ideological project of Hindu nationalism, which has weaponised these orientalist tropes to justify the ongoing colonisation of India-Kashmir and the systematic othering of its Muslim majority.

The question of who belongs in Kashmir, and who gets to define it, has never been merely academic. It is a question written in blood, displacement, and the language of competing nationalisms.

Annexed by India in 1947 through the contested Instrument of Accession, Jammu and Kashmir was granted ‘special status’ under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, a status effectively dismantled in 2019 amid heavily militarised conditions.

Today, as New Delhi strips Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir of its autonomy and Bollywood produces films that either sanitise or demonise Kashmiri Muslims, tracing the genealogy of these representations becomes an urgent political task.

The colonial gaze and the ‘paradise’ myth

European fascination with Kashmir began with travellers like François Bernier, a French physician who accompanied Aurangzeb’s entourage to the valley in the 17th century. Bernier likened Kashmir’s mountains to Mount Olympus and its meadows to European gardens, “enamelled with our European flowers and plants, and covered with our apple, pear, plum”. The language of possession — ‘our’ fruits in ‘their’ land — reveals the European impulse to claim Kashmir as a distant reflection of itself, a space of familiarity amid the strangeness of the Orient.

This fascination with places and people perceived as similar to Europe created a substantial readership for travel writing as a genre. The European identity was affirmed through encounters with distant lands that could be made familiar, comprehensible, and available for appropriation.

Dawn for more

by ANANYA BHATTACHARYA

Nearly a year after launching a nationwide crypto payment system for tourists, merchants say hardly anyone is using it — raising questions about who the experiment really serves.

• Bhutan launched a nationwide crypto payment system for tourists in May 2024, allowing payments in 100+ cryptocurrencies via Binance.
• Over 1,000 merchants signed up initially, but actual usage has been minimal nearly a year later.
• Many merchants say no customers have paid in crypto and that tourists often don’t know it’s an option.

Nine months into its big push for cryptocurrency payments, Bhutan isn’t finding many takers for its plans.

Last May, Bhutan became the first country to launch a nationwide crypto payment network for tourists. Visitors to the Himalayan kingdom could pay for their visas, flights, hotels, and meals in more than 100 cryptocurrencies via Binance. Within the first month of its launch, over 1,000 merchants signed up to receive payments in crypto.

Almost a year on, though, nothing much has changed on the ground.

In Thimphu, the QR codes displayed by local businesses to receive crypto payments gather dust. Several merchants have never had any customers opt for them.

“It has been four to five months, but no customer has used it until now,” Sonam Dorji, who works at Lotus Peak Enterprise, a handicraft store on the premises of the Le Meridien hotel, told Rest of World. “No one knows that we accept cryptocurrency and Binance Pay.”

Experts and locals said the government’s push for cryptocurrency is driven by its own massive bitcoin reserves, and doesn’t account for structural hurdles like power shortage and low literacy, which make the transition unlikely.

“Mining bitcoin gives [Bhutan] a currency to purchase imports that it didn’t have before, so I understand why the political establishment in the country wants to go for digital payments,” Jay Zagorsky, a professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, told Rest of World. “However, just because the central bank is pushing Bhutan society toward digital payments does not make it sensible.”

Zagorsky is the author of The Power of Cash: Why Using Paper Money is Good For You and Society. The book argues that preserving physical money is essential to protect individual privacy, curb overspending, and prevent the economic exclusion of the world’s most vulnerable populations.

Rest of world for more

by MACKENZIE SCOTT

Lately I’ve been thinking about murmurations of starlings. The direction of these flights of millions of birds is not determined by any single leader or delegation, but by the responses of each bird to the needs and movements of the birds around it. In this way, they are constantly creating their direction together, and no bird among them can know what shape it will take or where they will land.

There is a prophecy written by Hopi elders in the year 2000. It encourages us to recognize and celebrate our role as active participants in the co-creation of our communities.    

It’s easy to focus on the methods of civic participation that make news, and hard to imagine the importance of the things we do each day with our own minds and hearts. Who nurtured a child in the kitchen; who was kind to a stranger in line at a grocery store; who gave fifty dollars to a local food shelter: these are not news stories. But all of it matters.

Since my post last December, I’ve given $7,166,000,000 to organizations doing work all over the world. This dollar total will likely be reported in the news, but any dollar amount is a vanishingly tiny fraction of the personal expressions of care being shared into communities this year. To use just one year in the United States as an example, the total donated to US charities of all kinds in 2020 was $471 billion, nearly a third of it in increments of less than $5,000. There was also $68 billion in reported financial support sent to family members living in other countries, tens of billions in crowdfunding, $200 billion in volunteer labor at service organizations, and nearly $700 billion in wages for the paid employees who chose to take jobs delivering those services over jobs where they might have earned more. Over 70% of Americans reported giving both labor and money to people they know, and half reported doing the same for strangers. That’s well over a trillion dollars worth of individual humanitarian action that we don’t read about online or hear about on the nightly news. To begin to imagine how much more there must be, just consider how many people take time out of their income-producing activities every day to listen with compassion, or to speak up for someone.  

And the multiplier effect on the social value of every one of these forms of benevolent contribution is huge.

Generosity and kindness engage the same pleasure centers in the brain as sex, food, and receiving gifts, and they improve our health and long-term happiness as well. The peace-fostering byproducts of one unexpected act of kindness toward a stranger of different background or beliefs might inspire a beneficial chain reaction that goes on for years. Respect, understanding, insight, empathy, forgiveness, inspiration – all of these are meaningful contributions to others.

It is these ripple effects that make imagining the power of any of our own acts of kindness impossible. Whose generosity did I think of every time I made every one of the thousands of gifts I’ve been able to give? It was the local dentist who offered me free dental work when he saw me securing a broken tooth with denture glue in college. It was the college roommate who found me crying, and acted on her urge to loan me a thousand dollars to keep me from having to drop out in my sophomore year. And after she saw the difference she made in my life, what was she inspired to do, twenty years later? Start a company that offers loans to low-income students without a co-signer. And how quickly did I jump at the chance to be one of the people who supported her dream of supporting students just as she had once supported me? And to whom will each of the thousands of students thriving on those generosity- and gratitude-powered student loans go on to give? None of us has any idea.

The potential of peaceful, non-transactional contribution has long been underestimated, often on the basis that it is not financially self-sustaining, or that some of its benefits are hard to track. But what if these imagined liabilities are actually assets? What if these so-called weaknesses foster the strengths upon which the thriving (or even survival) of our civilization depends? What if the fact that some of our organizations are vulnerable can itself be a powerful engine for our generosity? What if acts of service that we can feel but can’t always measure expand our capacity for connection and trust? What if care is a way for all of us to make a difference in leading and shaping our countries? Votes are not the only way to show what we’d like to see more of in our societies. There are many ways to influence how we move through the world, and where we land.

 

Hopi Prophecy,

(The Hopi Prophecy translated from Hopi Elder Chief Dan Evehema, June 2000)

You have been telling people that this is the Eleventh Hour, now you must go back and tell the people that this is the Hour. And there are things to be considered…

Where are you living?
What are you doing?
What are your relationships?
Are you in right relation?
Where is your water?

Know your garden.
It is time to speak your truth.
Create your community.
Be good to each other.
And do not look outside yourself for your leader.

Then he clasped his hands together, smiled, and said, “This could be a good time! There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore. They will feel they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly. Know the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above the water.

And I say, see who is in there with you and celebrate. At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally, least of all ourselves. For the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey come to a halt.

The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves! Banish the word ‘struggle’ from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

Yield Giving for more

by PETER LUKACS

The metaphor of rewiring offers an ideal of engineered precision. But the brain is more like a forest than a circuit board

Popular wisdom holds we can ‘rewire’ our brains: after a stroke, after trauma, after learning a new skill, even with 10 minutes a day on the right app. The phrase is everywhere, offering something most of us want to believe: that when the brain suffers an assault, it can be restored with mechanical precision. But ‘rewiring’ is a risky metaphor. It borrows its confidence from engineering, where a faulty system can be repaired by swapping out the right component; it also smuggles that confidence into biology, where change is slower, messier and often incomplete. The phrase has become a cultural mantra that is easier to comprehend than the scientific term, neuroplasticity – the brain’s ability to change and form new neural connections throughout life.

But what does it really mean to ‘rewire’ the brain? Is it a helpful shorthand for describing the remarkable plasticity of our nervous system or has it become a misleading oversimplification that distorts our grasp of science?

After all, ‘rewiring your brain’ sounds like more than metaphor. It implies an engineering project: a system whose parts can be removed, replaced and optimised. The promise is both alluring and oddly mechanical. The metaphor actually did come from engineering. To an engineer, rewiring means replacing old and faulty circuits with new ones. As the vocabulary of technology crept into everyday life, it brought with it a new way of thinking about the human mind.

Medical roots of the phrase trace back to 1912, when the British surgeon W Deane Butcher compared the body’s neural system to a house’s electrical wiring, describing how nerves connect to muscles much like wires connect appliances to a power source. By the 1920s, the Harvard psychologist Leonard Troland was referring to the visual system as ‘an extremely intricate telegraphic system’, reinforcing the comparison between brain function and electrical networks.

The metaphor of rewiring also draws strength from changing theories in developmental neuroscience. The brain was thought to be largely static after childhood, becoming a fixed network of circuits, much like a hardwired radio. But beginning in the 1960s, researchers showed that the brain was far more adaptable. Stroke patients could regain function by recruiting new areas of the brain.

These findings revolutionised rehabilitation medicine. They also gave rise to an idea that would quickly leap beyond the clinic: if brains can rewire, then people can change.

Aeon for more

by GHADA AGEEL

The Canadian prime minister delivered a stirring speech in Davos on the failures of international law – yet he remains silent in the face of Israel’s ongoing slaughter

Seven people, spanning three generations of one family, were burned alive late last month after an Israeli missile struck a tent encampment where they were sleeping in Gaza’s al-Mawasi area.

The oldest was Rebhi Abu Hadayed, 69, and the youngest was his granddaughter, five-year-old Laya. Rebhi was preparing to go to the mosque for morning prayers, and his brother, Mohammed, was already at the mosque when he heard the explosion.

Mohammed rushed back to find carnage. Two of Rebhi’s sons and one of their spouses had also been killed, along with two other grandchildren, seven-year-old Sham and eight-year-old Jebreel. And this was just the latest tragedy for their family: several other relatives had been killed previously in an Israeli attack last July.

The slaughter of Rebhi and his family came on a bloody day in Israel’s ongoing genocide, with at least 31 Palestinians killed, despite the “ceasefire” that began months earlier, on 10 October.

The slaughter began around 4am on 31 January, when Israeli warplanes targeted a residential building housing the al-Atbash family in western Gaza City, killing three children, Zeina, Maryam, and Manah, aged seven, five and three, their aunt 24-years-old Islam and their 69-years-old grandmother Olfat.

Also among the dead on that fateful day were seven-year-old Mohammed Rezeq and his grandmother, who lived near an Unrwa clinic in Gaza City. Around the same time, Israeli forces attacked the nearby Sheikh Radwan police station, killing 15 people, including six visitors and nine staff.

Between 31 January and 4 February ( five days), about 60 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. This amounts to an average of approximately 12 people killed each day, meaning that a Palestinian life has been taken roughly every 2 hours during this period of supposingly ceasefire.

These figures do not humanise the loss, but they do expose the relentless pace of destruction of palestinian life that words alone often fail to capture.

Decisive moment

Less than two weeks earlier, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney had made global headlines after delivering a forceful speech on the “old” and “new” world order at the World Economic Forum in Davos. 

Speaking at a decisive moment to a global audience grappling with protracted wars, and amid a crisis in the systems designed to protect civilians – including the steady erosion of international legal norms – Carney articulated a diagnosis that seemed to offer analytical clarity and moral resolve. 

When Palestinian lives were at stake, Carney looked away – not once, but at least 1,450 times

“We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient … And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim,” Carney said.

While Canada is not a great power, he said it has something just as important: “the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home, and to act together”. 

“That is Canada’s path,” he declared. “We choose it openly and confidently.”

Carney followed his Davos speech with a statement days later, marking the occasion of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in 1945. 

“Looking away,” he said, “is not a passive act, but an active betrayal.”

On 31 January, these noble words were tested in Gaza – and Canada failed utterly. When Palestinian lives were at stake, Carney looked away – not once, but at least 1,450 times. That is the reported number of ceasefire violations committed by Israel between 10 October and 31 January.

MEE for more