The only people who identify Hillary Clinton as part of the “left” are the wingnuts on right-wing talk radio and Fox News.

By their standards, Clinton and all Democrats save Joe Lieberman are closet left-wing revolutionaries just waiting for the chance to nationalize industries and make peace with America’s adversaries.

Hillary Clinton has been a strong backer of the Iraq war from the outset, never expressed regret over her pro-war posturing, and now is only backing away from the war because it has failed.

Clinton a leftist? When is the last time you saw her on the front lines of a labor struggle?   more »

When Osama bin Laden issued his videotaped message to the American people last month, a young jihad enthusiast went online to help spread the word.

“America needs to listen to Shaykh Usaamah very carefully and take his message with great seriousness,” he wrote on his blog. “America is known to be a people of arrogance.”

Unlike Mr. bin Laden, the blogger was not operating from a remote location.

It turns out he is a 21-year-old American named Samir Khan who produces his blog from his parents’ home in North Carolina, where he serves as a kind of Western relay station for the multimedia productions of violent Islamic groups.   more »

Nietzsche distinguished between

master and slave moralities

The former challenges societal orthodoxy [its ideology],

the latter is a conditioned subject.

The "good" man of the master morality equates to

the "evil" man of the slave morality

   more »

Keywords: nietzsche, god, dead, master, slave

Johnson has no patience for those who attribute 9/11-style terrorism to a clash of civilizations or an unchanging "Salafi radicalism" and its irredeemably wicked adherents.

He argues that anti-American rage, rather than emerging fully formed from a highly malleable religious tradition, has been triggered by decades of immoral and illegal behavior by American officials and proxies abroad.

It is unavoidable that some of these "secret U.S. government operations and acts in distant lands would come back to haunt us," Johnson writes.

He is thinking of covert actions well-known to Iranians and Guatemalans and Chileans (not to mention the US agents who carried them out) but that have barely penetrated the consciousness of most American citizens.   more »

We must set the idea of the ‘war on terror’ in the context of several hundred years of imperial and colonial rule.

This has resulted in a deeply inculcated mindset that has made a significant segment of the population of the West highly receptive to a propaganda campaign that uses xenophobic and racist motifs to put the ‘frighteners’ on them.

Consider also the timescale involved, over a decade of an increasingly hysterical campaign of demonisation that started with Saddam Hussein in 1990, culminating in 2001 with 9/11, a campaign that also set the stage for domestic repression.

Was this a carefully conceived and long term plan? I doubt it and in any case, it doesn’t really matter whether it ‘evolved’ over time or not.

What is important is that it fits the ‘classical’ pattern laid down in the 1930s by the Nazi propaganda ministry, who were the first to formalise mass propaganda campaigns and to identify and define the essential elements; the ‘big lie’, repetition, the use of stereotypes, fear as a weapon of control and manipulation.   more »