Today, Israeli forces once again opened fire on desperate Palestinians seeking aid from a supply convoy entering Gazy City. This is the second such attack since last Thursday’s “flour massacre” which killed at least 117 people. (Al Jazeera)
The Boston Massacre
On this day in 1770, American colonists gathered at the Customs House in Boston and began taunting the British soldiers guarding the building. The protesters, who called themselves Patriots, were protesting the occupation of their city by British troops. The soldiers fired on the crowd and when the smoke cleared, five colonists were dead or dying including Crispus Attucks, an African American, believed to be the first to fall in the American Revolutionary War.
I don’t know the name of the first Palestinian to fall in Gaza’s “flour massacre.”
Just saying…
Nuland, the coup-maker, quits
US Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, number three at the State Department, says that she will leave her post in the coming weeks.
Nuland, widely regarded as a neocon foreign policy hawk and regime-changer, engineered the US-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014 which overthrew the elected, pro-Russian regime, destabilizing the region, and leading up to war.
Days before the February coup, she was recorded discussing how to “midwife this thing” with the then-US ambassador to Kyiv, Geoffrey Pyatt, reportedly exclaiming “F**k the EU” when it came to a choice of a new leader in the war-torn country.
As the State Department’s top Russia official during the Obama administration, she had argued unsuccessfully for arming Ukraine with antitank missiles, and during the Biden administration has been among the biggest proponents of sending Ukraine billions more in US weapons.
According to the NYT,
A skilled bureaucratic operator, she delivered her arguments with sharp wit and a bluntness that drew a mixture of admiration and fear from colleagues.
Why she’s leaving now is anyone’s guess.
Some analysts interpreted the dumping of Nuland as a sign that President Biden and Blinken feel bogged down in the unwinnable US proxy war with Russia in Ukraine and want to refocus foreign and military policy onto China.
In other words, from the frying pan into the fire.
I have been reading Amatav Ghosh's - Smoke and Ashes. I am learning even more about Empire, his recurrent theme. The boston tea party was in part a pushback on the British raising Tea Tax all over the work. This tax on tea was critical to funding the Empire. It paid for the import of tea from China (which had a monopoly) since they had little to trade for the tea so the British paid in bullion when they ran out of bullion (gold and silver) they started growing opium in India and selling it to the Chinese thus enslaving both the producer and the users and paying for that navy and colonial administration.
A bit complicated but Ghosh lays it out beautifully showing that the British industrial revolution and the colonial empire for 200 years was funded by Opium. (Also his Nutmeg's Curse traces the power of big Oil and its interweaving with military power and the growing climate catastrophe.