Please go to the links to access the full articles.
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2026/01/why-might-makes-right-is-dangerous-for-all-of-us.html
Jaqcues Baud, who was recently sanctioned by the European Union, is lamenting on Dialog Works that – The World Is Entering a Lawless Era (vid).
He is right of course, but late.
International law, developed over centuries, has been broken by the U.S. and other imperial forces ever since it was established.
But after World War II such breaches, even when obvious, were clad in propaganda which claimed that each of those was about the enforcement of higher values. Villains had to be fought, dictators opposed, evil communists had to be prevented from stealing from their people. The old and new neo-conservatives were masters in this. The blatant imperial attacks of Iraq and Afghanistan were sold as good men’s missions to bring democracy to the downtrodden and suppressed poor people in those countries. We had to liberate their women.
That propaganda that covered the brutal wars of conquest under the mantle of democracy promotion held up for a while. It served two purposes.
It allowed U.S. vassals to justify their co-operation with the imperialists. It also allowed a significant part of the ‘western’ populations to still feel good about their countries. When the wars went southward and losses increased they acknowledged that waging those wars were bad. But the consoling feeling was that at least “We Meant Well“, as one of those imperialists ransacking Iraq titled his memoir.
It worked for a while for some people. The Iraq war was protested against in Europe. Germany and France rejected the war and Congress renamed french fries into freedom fries.
But even their moral high ground has further deteriorated since.
The decade long dirty war against Syria was supported by all NATO countries. The 2014 Nazi-coup in Kiev and the following war against the people of Donbas were patched over. Western propaganda drowned out all protests. But the doubts about these wars lingered. The propaganda was becoming too obvious..........
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From Noriega to Maduro: The Long US History of Kidnapping Foreign Leaders
https://thegrayzone.com/2026/01/05/indictment-maduro-cia-network-witness/
Behind the DOJ’s politicized indictment of Maduro: a CIA-created ‘network’ and coerced star witness
The Gathering Storm: Snatch-and-Grab Regime Change is the New New Normal
Well, that didn’t take long. No sooner had the metaphorical ink dried on my New World Next Year prediction that 2026 would be the “Year of the Storm” than the storm in fact began.
Specifically, it began in the form of a spectacular overnight raid on January 2, 2026, that resulted in the successful abduction of former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
And now, all hell’s broken loose.
But don’t take it from me. Take it from German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier (better known to non-Germans as “who the hell is that guy?”). Remarking on the spectacular events of the past week, he has opined that Trump and the US are now destroying the very post-WWII world order that the US helped create.
Hmm. If I didn’t know better, I’d say a New World Order is in the offing. Now who could have possibly predicted that?
So, what the hell does all this really mean? Good question. Let’s answer it, shall we?......................
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https://news.antiwar.com/2026/01/11/trump-we-are-going-to-be-doing-something-with-greenland/
Trump: We Are Going to Be Doing Something With Greenland
President Donald Trump threatened that he was willing to take control of Greenland the “hard way.”
“I’m not talking about money for Greenland yet. I might talk about that. But right now we are going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not,” the President said Friday. “I would like to make a deal. You know, the easy way. But if we don’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way.”
Trump’s plan to take over Greenland will face several challenges. Greenland is a colony of Denmark, a NATO ally. Copenhagen says it will not give the US control of its colony. Last week, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen condemned “unacceptable pressure” by the Trump administration to acquire Greenland, warning it would destroy NATO. ........................
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The Toxic Innocence of Empire: The US and Israel, Forever Blameless, Always Pure in Motive
On the madness of perpetual war and imperialist overreach
There is an exact and troubling historical correlation between the Trump administration’s imperialist aggression against Venezuela and Israel’s perpetual crimes against humanity. Both can be traced to a Western settler-colonialist worldview possessed by a sense of insatiable entitlement, and the psychological carnage concomitant to a citizenry given to the brutality inherent to the pursuit of colonialist and/or imperialist agendas.
Whether the collective mode of mind is termed Manifest Destiny or Zionist doctrine, both are manifested in the ethnic cleansing of indigenous people that can be traced back to a European belief system that insists upon its innate (White supremacy-rancid) superiority.
Both the denizens of Manifest Destiny and Zionist true believers retail the Big Lie: that the people resisting their land-thieving aggression are mindless savages who, without provocation, and simply maddened by bloodlust, present an existential threat to their (forever innocent and blameless) existence.
For example, unhinged, rage-frothing Zionist apologists’ accusations that critiques of Israel are not only anti-semitic declarations, but are “Blood Libel.”
How could it be true, that, as a Jewish person, that because I experience a sense of mortification in regard to the IDF perpetration of large scale collective punishment in Gaza is analogous to the Middle Ages’ dark fantasy that we Jews sprinkle gentile blood on our sabbath bread? Moreover, how could it also be true that condemnation of the Zionist state’s acts of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and its perpetration of genocide in Gaza is defamation directed at all Jews? Of course, the accusations are merely attempts to silence critiques of Israeli policies............
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https://scheerpost.com/2026/01/09/chris-hedges-grand-illusion/
All empires, when they are dying, worship the idol of war. War will save the empire. War will resurrect past glory. War will teach an unruly world to obey. But those who bow down before the idol of war, blinded by hypermasculinity and hubris, are unaware that while idols begin by calling for the sacrifice of others, they end by demanding self-sacrifice. Ekpyrosis, the inevitable conflagration that destroys the world according to the ancient Stoics, is part of the cyclical nature of time. There is no escape. Fortuna. There is a time for individual death. There is a time for collective death. In the end, with weary citizens yearning for extinction, empires light their own funeral pyre.
Our high priests of war, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine, are no different from the fools and charlatans who snuffed out empires of the past — the haughty leaders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the militarists in imperial Germany and the hapless court of Tsarist Russia in World War I. They were followed by the fascists in Italy under Benito Mussolini, Germany under Adolf Hitler and the military rulers of imperial Japan in World War II.
These political entities committed collective suicide.
They drank the same fatal elixir Miller and those in the Trump White House imbibe. They too tried to use industrial violence to reshape the universe. They too considered themselves to be omnipotent. They too saw themselves in the face of the idol of war. They too demanded to be obeyed and worshiped.
Destruction to them is creation. Dissent is sedition. The world is one-dimensional. The strong versus the weak. Only our nation is great. Other nations, even allies, are dismissed with contempt.
These architects of imperial folly are buffoons and killer clowns. They are ridiculed and hated by those rooted in a reality-based world. They are followed slavishly by the desperate and the disenfranchised. The simplicity of the message is its appeal. A magic incantation will bring back the lost world, the golden age, however mythic. Reality is viewed exclusively through the lens of ultranationalism. The flip side of ultranationalism is racism.....................
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https://codepink.substack.com/p/whos-really-running-venezuela
Who’s Really Running Venezuela?
The world was mystified when President Trump first said that the United States would “run” Venezuela. He has since made it clear that he wants to control Venezuela by imposing a U.S. monopoly on selling its oil to the rest of the world, to trap the Venezuelan government in a subservient relationship with the United States.
The U.S. Energy Department has published a plan to sell Venezuelan oil already seized by the United States and then to use the same system for all future Venezuelan oil exports. The U.S. would dictate how the revenues are divided between the U.S. and Venezuela, and continue this form of control indefinitely. Trump is planning to meet with U.S. oil company executives on Friday, January 9th, to discuss his plan.
Trump’s plan would cut off Venezuela’s trade with China, Russia, Iran, and other countries, and force it to spend its oil revenues on goods and services from the United States. This new form of economic colonialism would also prevent Venezuela from continuing to spend the bulk of its oil revenues on its generous system of social spending, which has lifted millions of Venezuelans out of poverty.
However, on January 7th, the New York Times reported that Venezuela has other plans. “Venezuela’s state-run oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, confirmed for the first time that it was negotiating the “sale” of crude oil to the United States,” the Times reported. “It said in a statement on social media that it was using “frameworks similar to those currently in effect with international companies, such as Chevron, and is based on a strictly commercial transaction.”
Trump has threatened further military action to remove acting president Delcy Rodriguez from office if she does not comply with U.S. plans for Venezuela. But Trump has already bowed to reality by cooperating with Rodriguez, recognizing that Maria Corina Machado, the previous U.S. favorite, lacks popular support in Venezuela. The very presence of Delcy Rodriguez as acting president exposes the failure of Trump’s regime change operation and his well-founded reluctance to unleash yet another unwinnable U.S. war.........
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