The West has been attacking Iran for defending itself and its allies since the early 1950s. To understand the issues between the two countries we have to go back to the roots.
1.The Zionist occupation of Palestine and the displacement and oppression of the mostly Muslim Arab population since the 1930s. Iran sees itself as one of the few active protectors of Palestine. Its funding of Hamas and Hezbollah are all about supporting the Palestinian fight for freedom from occupation and oppression. Here’s a recent quote from the Iranian FM: “The current crisis is rooted in the occupation of the Palestinian territories, displacement of its original inhabitants, organized killings and terrorism, looting of natural resources, apartheid and systematic discrimination and continued aggression on al-Quds in the last 75 years.”
Every time anyone from the West points the finger at Iran as being the instigator of tensions without also acknowledging this history, they are selling you a fairytale.
One of my hobbies at the moment is to use ChatGPT to help me analyse the news. I imagine this will be come pretty standard in the near future, and there will be better tools to use. At the moment it seems the ABC has blocked ChatGPT from reading its articles, so I have to copy and paste the article into GPT. But then I run a couple of prompts to get it to breakdown the story for me. My basic objective is to get GPT to act as a second brain, helping me uncover the biases in news stories and highlight the gaps in the coverage.
If you want to understand why the USA is terrified of China, trying to slow it down with a trade war and banning it’s social media apps, it has less to do with “national security” and mostly to do with R&D expenditure. Have a look at the way China’s R&D has grown in the last 20 years. In 2000, their R&D was about 1/10 of the USA’s. Today, they have nearly caught up (although private R&D in the US continues to keep them ahead). And there are no signs of China slowing down, either, with a goal of a 10% YoY increase declared at the latest “Two Sessions“.
The US National Science Board recently warned that “China has now surpassed us in STEM talent production, research publications, patents, and knowledge-and technology-intensive manufacturing… China has set the goal of being the world’s leading S&E (Science & Engineering) nation and these NSB reports demonstrate that the United States is on the verge of allowing them to realize that objective. We already see this in artificial intelligence, where China out publishes us, has more patents, and produces more students than the United States.”
What happens when most of the latest technological innovation is coming out of “Communist” China?
For example, he talks about the “grim conditions created by a dysfunctional economy”, but fails to mention these grim conditions are largely caused by crippling and illegal US sanctions. The sanctions have been criticized by the UN high commissioner for human rights who said last year they would ‘significantly exacerbate the crisis for millions of ordinary Venezuelans’, but the Post doesn’t even mention them until paragraph 8 and even then not mentioning the UN criticism or the illegality of the sanctions. He also doesn’t mention the report published by the Washington-based Centre for Economic and Policy Research last year that 40,000 people may have died in Venezuela since 2017 because of US sanctions.
The Post then goes on to quote Ecuadoran President Lenín Moreno who “insisted that Maduro’s “despotic regime” had to go”. Moreno is the guy who took a sharp turn to the right when he became President in 2017, after a meeting with Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort (currently serving seven years in jail), then revoked Julian Assange’s asylum, after allowing Assange’s private conversations with his lawyers be bugged and shared with the US (it’s alleged), and accepted a US-backed $10 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. It’s the same Moreno who has been roundly criticised by his own people during the 2019 Ecuadorian protests, and who is currently sitting on an all-time low popularity, reaching only 7% of approval as of February 2020.
One of the guys who created the CIA torture program says that waterboarding a prisoner, who has been held in jail for 13 years and never charged with a crime, over 80 times, only “verged” on breaking the law. Gee, I’d hate to see what ACTUALLY breaking the law looks like.
Imagine what kind of person you have to be to get paid $80 million to design a torture program.
