The Post-Partisan Emporium

The Curious Case of the Croatian Commander-in-Chief "Bigmouth Strikes Again" - Speaking out of turn on the War in Ukraine Niccolo Soldo In the run-up to the second invasion of Iraq, President George W. Bush  famously stated : “you’re either with us, or you’re against us”. By this point in time, Afghanistan had already been occupied, al-Qaida scattered to the winds, and the Taliban soundly defeated. The neo-conservatives then running US foreign policy were feeling their strength, and had set their sights on their old foe, Saddam Hussein, in order to ‘regime change’ Iraq in the name of “fighting terror”. It was all bullshit, as we now know. Hussein had nothing to do with the 9/11 terror attacks, but had everything to do with not stepping aside to allow US Empire to expand to the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, next door to the main Middle Eastern prize: Iran. Hussein would have to go, no matter how many lies needed to be told, no matter how many people would have to b...

Never let a mass shooting go to waste when it can serve the cause of identity politics By Bernard Carpenter FOR those who choose to see the world entirely through the lens of race – a rapidly growing demographic in this third decade of the twenty-first century – January 2023 has been a perplexing and disconcerting month when it comes to the racial configurations of violent crime. First, there were the 11 people murdered in an attack at a dance studio in Monterey Park near Los Angeles on January 21. Those killed were all Asian-Americans, as was the gunman who later took his own life in a shopping centre car park. The victims ranged in age from 57 to 76, and the perpetrator, Huu Can Tran, an immigrant from China, whose motivations remain unclear, was 72, a ripe old age for one who engages in mass slaughter of this kind. Four days later another mass shooting took place in Half Moon Bay, a picturesque coastal city about 30 miles south of San Francisco. Again, the perpetrator was Asian-...