What we are witnessing is not just the end of a regime but quite possibly the destruction of the Syrian state.  We are being told by the Western media that we should join Benjamin Netanyahu, Joe Biden and the Europeans in celebrating what risks being the creation of yet another failed state in the Middle East/West Asia. 

They “will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America."  Donald J Trump about the people of Gaza and their defenders.

“Western justifications for their barbarism is well-established – after all, genocide is a Western liberal value.” Professor Joseph Massad.

Imagine any human being chanting “Why is school out in Gaza?  There are no children left there!” after an entire year of genocide in Gaza, after the deaths of so many thousands of children, after thousands of children have lost limbs due to US-Israeli violence, hundreds of thousands having to sleep in tents, a couple of million people being slowly starved by Israel.  Imagine who is capable of chanting that.  

Former director of the CIA’s Russia desk and current director of Grand Strategy at the Quincy Institute George Beebe gives a masterclass in responsible statecraft - and why the West must negotiate with Russia to end the war.

What is at stake is epochal in its scale and implications for future generations. In the midst of a genocide, on the edge of wars that could wreck the global economy, we are also experiencing an increasingly ruthless war being waged to eliminate or silence dissent.  All of this means we have to build a better media environment that will challenge the dominant narrative; we have to find the courage within ourselves to oppose the terrible trajectory the Western elites have committed us to.  

Something absolutely stupefying is happening in Germany: its iconic auto company, VW, the darling of every Chancellor from Adolf Hitler to Olaf Scholz, appears to be in a death spiral.  At the end of this story I’ll draw a link to the salutary lesson countries like Australia and New Zealand need to draw from the German experience if we are to survive and thrive in the coming world.

History didn’t start on October 7th. True that. To get a deeper sense of why the shocking destruction in Gaza is happening we have to revive the forgotten war that the US waged against North Korea in the 1950s.  In many ways, it was the template for all that followed.

Ordinary New Zealanders and Australians have little idea about the momentous changes coming our way. For a couple of centuries we have been outposts of a Western empire that is losing its dominance of the region. Instead of having open national discussions about how our countries should respond to the rise of China, India and Indonesia – just part of the coming Asian Century – our leaders are shuttering our minds and framing public discourse in ways that hinder rather than help.  Our media and many leading members of the commentariat are keeping our collective minds in thrall to a US-Western world view.  If we wish to survive and thrive in this region – and in the emerging multipolar world – we may need to free ourselves from this form of mental slavery.

Iran may be about to launch a proper missile strike on Israel for the first time ever - in retaliation for the attack on Tehran last month which killed Ismail Haniyeh. Israeli intelligence says an attack is likely to come within days.

The Jerusalem Post on 11 August quoted Ahmad Bakhshayesh Ardestani, a member of the Iranian Parliament's National Security Commission, as saying, "Iran's aerial operations against Israel could last three to four days.”

“A fairer multipolar world order is being born”. Eight words that sum up what is being created at pace and yet is being largely ignored by the Western media. “Tectonic shifts” indeed are happening as the countries that represent the bulk of Eurasia’s landmass, economy, population and military might come together in an alliance that not only is linking the vast region that stretches from Europe to the Sea of Japan, but will transform global power dynamics for the coming century and push the demi-gods of the Western World out of the driver’s seat and back into the ranks of humanity.

Very few people have tuned into the fact that what is happening isn't “NATO” moving into the Asia Pacific region – it’s actually far bigger than that. The US is creating a super-bloc, a super-alliance of client states that includes both the EU and NATO, the AP4 (its key Asia Pacific partners Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Japan) and other partners like the Philippines (now the Marcos dynasty is back at the helm).

The most powerful weapon in the US arsenal is not F-16 jets, Himar missiles, or any of the other conventional war toys. Real US power resides in the US dollar. By increasingly weaponizing the dollar and access to the dollar-denominated global trading system, America has taken to the greenback with a blowtorch that will trigger a reckoning for the ages.