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We Need To Talk About...

We Need To Talk About...

Written by: krkelly
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 Sometimes it feels like there are so many unaddressed elephants in the room that there is scarcely room for oxygen. I want to deal with basic matters that affect everyday political culture, but that we take for granted or feel unable to discuss. I am doing this in the most raw, bare bones way possible. It is just me speaking from notes.Copyright 2024 All rights reserved. Political Science Politics & Government Social Sciences World
Episodes
  • Episode 13: We Need To Talk About Venezuela

    Episode 13: We Need To Talk About Venezuela
    Jan 17 2026

    I'm not an expert on Venezuela but I feel a need to address some things that are not being properly addressed and draw links between certain things and certain other things. That sounds a bit mysterious, but I think the reason I feel the need to record this is because we have people trying to talk to anti-imperialist leftists who are saying not to support the Venezuelan government. What bothers me is that the whole thing has an air of “do you condemn Hamas?” about it. The choice of bringing this up at this particular time, whether it is intended to or not, serves to blunt and dissipate opposition to the imperial aggression when the aggression should be our only current concern.

    Venezuela has been under a very real and unrelenting attack for quarter of a century and that attack has involved armed violence, including a mercenary incursion, systematic misinformation and disinformation, and brutal economic warfare. No worthwhile opinion or analysis of the issues can omit this fundamental truth.
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    1 hr and 30 mins
  • Ep12: We Need to Talk About Iraq

    Ep12: We Need to Talk About Iraq
    Jun 6 2025
    Everything happening in Gaza is linked to what was done by the US and UK to Iraq. Technologies and techniques of urban warfare, of occupation, of psychological warfare, of oppression, of destruction, of torture and of propaganda were developed and shared between Israeli and the Coalition forces occupying Iraq. Each was used as a training ground and laboratory for the other. Like Gaza the nature of the violence in Iraq was genocidal. The people were the target. Educators and schools were targeted. Doctors and clinics and ambulances were targeted. Local officials were targeted. The fabric of society was targeted. Nothing that happened was the byproduct of different acts aimed at only the regime or its military force. Like the Israeli government of today the US lied and deceived so it could wipe out whole families; they schemed so they could destroy water infrastructure and spread disease, and they fought tooth and nail for years to ensure that thousands upon thousands of children would slowly die of easily preventable causes. Iraq and Palestine are linked through thousands of years of history, and sorrowfully linked as targets for the same imperial project. Of late people who want to highlight the suffering happening now in Gaza have sought to suppress or misrepresent what happened in Iraq. They want to increase the sense of urgency by making the Gaza Holocaust seem unprecedented, as if the human suffering is not enough in itself. This can only harm the cause of the Palestinian people and others. Isolating the current events from the broader sweep of imperialist history (and the absolute necessity of genocide in modern imperialism) plays into the hands of those who are already trying to control the narrative of the Gaza Holocaust. People like Piers Morgan are trying to co-opt anti-genocide sentiment to their own abominable political project. They openly say that the problem is one of excess, not of fundamental injustice. They believe that Israel has the right to kill innocent people, they just think they have crossed the line in terms of numbers. Likewise Bernie Sanders and innumerable others of his ilk are trying to frame this orgy of genocidal slaughter and the slow starvation of a captive population as the product of the right-wing regime in Israel, when in reality it is the product of a global system that is absolutely reliant on the willing participation of many millions, not least people like Bernie Sanders who vote to send arms to Israel. Palestinians will never be safe if we cannot accurately understand why such monstrous violence is visited on them. Genocide is a strategy and the Palestinian people are the target. If we accept any analysis that frames the genocide as provoked by hatred or excessive zeal in prosecuting a war then we are dooming the Palestinians to suffer further genocidal violence either through slow strangulation or the swift brutality that arrives after Israel finds the next pretext for "defending" itself. We need to lift the scales from our eyes about the US empire, its practice of genocide, and its relationship to Israel. The victims of genocide in different times and places are only separate in our minds because it suits the purposes of the perpetrators. We have no choice but to develop a sense of solidarity as an ethos, as a powerful emotion, and as an intellectual conviction. We are not separate. That is not just sentiment, it is the key to understanding the worst violence of the modern world. Imperial genocides are just as pervasive as class antagonisms, and even more likely to be misrepresented as discrete unrelated phenomena. In reality these events often feature the same personnel (maybe decades apart in time and thousands of kilometres removed in space) committing the same forms of violence and destruction against the same parts of society, but each time with a completely different story of why, Iraq always had too much potential for strength and development. Its light oil provides far higher profit margins than heavier oil such as that found in Venezuela. Moreover Iraq's potential for nationalistic sentiment is 7000 years deep. The Iraqis were first targeted to exploit their oil, but then were targeted to control how they could use and profit from their own oil. The US would bait Saddam Hussein into two destructive deadly wars leading to hundreds of thousand of lost lives, then impose sanctions killing hundreds of thousands more, then invade causing around a million or more deaths. Most died directly at the hands of the US-led Coalition, but many would die from a civil war that the occupation unleashed. The true losses to Iraq and Iraqis are incalculable because there is no baseline to work from. There is not time when Iraq was left alone to its own affairs to make use of its own wealth. The past can not be undone. We must look to the future and that begins with refusing to lie about the past and refusing to turn away.
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    2 hrs and 45 mins
  • Ep 11: We Need To Talk About the US Role in the Gaza Holocaust

    Ep 11: We Need To Talk About the US Role in the Gaza Holocaust
    May 16 2025

    I speak here off the cuff about the centrality and culpability of the US in the Gaza Holocaust. I start by explaining why I use "Gaza Holocaust" as terminology.

    The US is not merely supporting Israel's genocidal slaughter in Gaza, it is a direct participant.

    In this video I depart from my usual format and the result is much briefer. "Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." ― Aldous Huxley.
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    23 mins
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