The Post-Partisan Emporium

The Summer of Living Dangerously PEPE ESCOBAR The plutocracy believes that afterwards they can buy the whole thing for a pittance while flies are still laying eggs in European carcasses. So Le Petit Roi in Paris was predictably crushed in the European polls. He has called parliamentary snap elections, dissolving the Assemblée Nationale in an act of blind, puerile revenge on French citizens, de facto attacking French institutional democracy. That doesn’t mean much anyway, because the lineaments of “liberty, equality, fraternity” have long been usurped by a crass oligarchy. The second round of these fresh French elections will be on July 7 – nearly coinciding with the British snap elections on July 11, and only a few days before the slow-burning urban catastrophe which will be the Olympics in Paris. Paris salons are ablaze with intrigue on why the little Rothschild stooge with a Napoleon complex is throwing all his toys out of the pram now because he’s not getting what he wants. After al

  Russia, SCO, BRICS: The Normalization of Afghanistan PEPE ESCOBAR   The whole Russia-Taliban affair involves a humongous package – encompassing oil, gas, minerals and loads of rail connectivity. This past Sunday in Doha, I had a meeting with three high-level representatives of the Taliban Political Office in Qatar, including a founding member of the body (in 2012) and a key official of the previous Taliban government of 1996-2001. By mutual consent, their names should not be made public. The cordial meeting was brokered by Professor Sultan Barakat, who teaches at the College of Public Policy at Hamad bin Khalifa University – set in an outstanding, immaculate campus outside of Doha which attracts students from across the Global South. Prof. Barakat is one of those very few – discreet – players who knows everything that matters in West Asia, and in his case, also in the intersection of Central and South Asia. With my three Taliban interlocutors, we talked extensively about the challeng

  If The Wars Go On Edward J. Curtin, Jr. I suppose my title could have been couched in the singular form, as Hermann Hesse, the Nobel Prize winning German/Swiss author, did with his collection of anti-war essays about World War I (the war to end all wars that didn’t),  If The War Goes On . . .   Or more appropriately, I might have eliminated that conditional “If” since it seems Pollyannish. It’s a long hard road, this anti-war business.  During the first Cold War and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis in the early sixties when Kennedy and Krushchev narrowly avoided blowing the world to smithereens, Bob Dylan put it right in his fierce song,  Masters of War : (Verse 1) Come, you masters of war You that build the big guns You that build the death planes You that build all the bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks (Verse 3) Like Judas of old You lie and deceive A world war can be won You want me to believe But I see th

  American Pravda: Gaza Protests and the Legend of the Tiananmen Square Massacre Audio Player The Israel/Gaza conflict is now well into its eighth month as the slaughter and starvation of Palestinians continues unabated, with many tens of thousands of helpless civilians already dead. Despite occasional bleats of feeble disapproval by members of the Biden Administration, America’s government has continued to fully support that massacre, providing all the necessary money and munitions that enable it. Although as far back as January, the jurists of the International Court of Justice had issued a series of near-unanimous rulings that the Palestinians were at risk of suffering genocide at the hands of an Israel consumed with bloodlust, the leadership of America and the West totally ignored that verdict. Just a couple of weeks ago, our government passed new legislation providing  an additional $26 billion in financial and military support  to that genocidally-minded country. When word came o