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Institute for Policy Research & Development, London: nafeez@iprd.org.uk SHARE
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Dr Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist, bestselling author and international security scholar. A former Guardian writer, he writes the 'System Shift' column for VICE's Motherboard, and is also a columnist for Middle East Eye. He is the winner of a 2015 Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian work.
Nafeez has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, New Internationalist, Counterpunch, Truthout, among others. He is the author of A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010), and the scifi thriller novel ZERO POINT, among other books. His work on the root causes and covert operations linked to international terrorism officially contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner's Inquest.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, February 28, 2008 Capitalism, Consumerism and Materialism: The Value Crisis
All our global economic, ecological, energy and other crises are reflections of an underlying deeper malaise; a crisis of values, erupting from the fundamentalist theology of market doctrine which reduces life to mindless materialistic categories. It's not just that our societies are unjust; it's that this injustice is making us physically and mentally ill. Something's gotta give...
(9 comments) SHARE Monday, February 8, 2010 Hitchens Has No Clothes: A Response to 'Vidal Loco'
Nafeez Ahmed faces off with Christopher Hitchens in a response to Hitchens's hitpiece on Gore Vidal in this month's Vanity Fair. Covers issues like the Iraq and Afghan Wars; 9/11; Pearl Harbour; Timothy McVeigh; intelligence politicization and corruption; the financial crisis; and most of all, the decline of Hitchens.
(7 comments) SHARE Wednesday, December 9, 2015 Paris climate negotiations won't stop the planet burning
The much-vaunted COP21 negotiations in Paris are, despite the claims of world leaders, dead on arrival.
Emissions reductions targets are not up for discussion. Those pledges are already on the table, having been put forward voluntarily by each country.
Government negotiators in Paris are instead looking at banal details of how and when countries should commit to improving their voluntary pledges...
(11 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 23, 2017 Thanksgiving: celebrating the hidden holocaust
Imagine if the Nazis won the Second World War. Yes, yes, I know there's a TV show about that -- but stay with me. So imagine: the Nazis won, and then every year, on the day when we currently hold"
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, October 9, 2006 The Muslim Problem
Muslims are a problem. Or rather, it seems, they are the perennial problem of our times. The last few weeks and months has seen a dramatic escalation in anti-Muslim hostility from key western political and religious figures. Repression of Muslims inside western Europe is conjoined to imperial violence against Muslim nations abroad. Are back in the 1930s?
(8 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 7, 2009 Gaza Catastrophe: Resource Conflict? Natural Gas, Palestinian Elections, and Israel's Subversion of the 'Peace Process'
The Gaza crisis cannot be understood without grasping the inherent assymetries in military violence; the racist nature of Israel's occupation; discoveries of natural gas reserves in Gaza; and joint US-UK-Israeli attempts to monopolise these energy resources through the cooptation of a Fatah-run Palestinian Authority. Operation Cast Lead heads-off incoming 09 Palestinian elections, for permanent "cantonization" and transfer.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, December 31, 2007 hidden holocaust--our civilizational crisis: THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT?
Today, we enter into a new year which brings us yet closer to the imminent convergence of global ecological, energy and economic crises that threaten not only the end of our species, but the end of all species on the Earth. This article summarises the major trends and realities of the current global crisis over the coming decades. The only way out is a total civilizational paradigm shift.
(6 comments) SHARE Monday, September 27, 2010 Sliding toward Climate Catastrophe - Danger of Gulf Stream Collapse?
A review of cutting-edge climate data indicates that if we continue business-as-usual, we are on course to trigger a process of dangerous, irreversible runaway warming that could lead to an 8 degree Celsius rise in global mean temperatures by the end of this century, which would make the planet truly uninhabitable.
(8 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 6, 2009 The End of Capitalism? Not quite, but nearly....
Does the global financial crisis imply the imminent demise of capitalism? Or is capitalism refining itself, and re-consolidating? What are the real deep-rooted structural origins of the current economic crisis, and how bad are things really going to get? The answer: The economic crisis is one face of a bigger systemic catastrophe that's going to get much worse, without an economic and social revolution.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 11, 2009 Torture, Rendition, Terror & Oil: A Primer on "Deep Politics"
Why does the CIA practice torture and rendition? What function do they serve in the 'War on Terror'? This analysis exposes the cross-cutting web of 'deep political' military-intelligence and financial ties that bind the West to terrorist networks, revealing rendition as part of a global system that uses fear to sustain itself.
(5 comments) SHARE Sunday, July 23, 2006 UK Govt Sources Confirm War With Iran Is On
UK govt sources confirm that war with Iran is planned before the end of the year, as part of a last-ditch military solution to rehabilitate a dying empire.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 2, 2017 Google, HuffPo, Greenpeace & the liberal progressive 'Resistance' are lying to you
the biggest opposition to the transformational change we need on the planet comes not from among the sources of power I traditionally investigate; not simply from the incumbency; not from the 'Deep State', 'Big Oil', 'Financial Elites', or other extractive industries; but from those amongst us who shout the clarion call for Change, who carry the banners of Resistance, who proudly wear the badges of Progress.
(6 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 17, 2015 ISIS wants to destroy the 'grey zone'. Here's how we defend it
So far, world governments have responded as if the ISIS attack came entirely out of the blue... The Paris attacks have occurred on the tail-end of an escalating series of massacres...
The goal is to inflict trauma, fear, paranoia, suspicion, panic & terror -- but there is a twisted logic as part of this continuum of violence, which is to draw the western world into an apocalyptic civilizational Armageddon with Islam
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, February 22, 2010 The Iran Threat? ... more of the same
Despite all the hyperventilating, all the evidence available still proves that Iran is nowhere near building a nuclear bomb. Meanwhile, viable initiatives for a peaceful resolution of the nuclear stalemate continue to be ignored and vetoed by the Obama administration.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, June 22, 2015 A scientific Model Supported By a UK Govt Taskforce Flags Risk of Civilisation's Collapse by 2040
New scientific models supported by the British government's Foreign Office show that if we don't change course, in less than three decades industrial civilisation will essentially collapse due to catastrophic food shortages, triggered by a combination of climate change, water scarcity, energy crisis, and political instability
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, August 10, 2010 Peak Coal Has Arrived
New study warns that world coal production will peak next year, and then decline inexorably.
(5 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 30, 2010 The Real ClimateGate, Part 1: Getting over the non-existent 'climate email' fiasco
The first in a two-part series investigating recent climate 'scandals', and the role of special interests in the fossil fuel industries in deliberately muddying the waters of public understanding to obstruct a clean energy transition. This article focuses on the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia Climate Research unit.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 25, 2014 How the Pentagon's Skynet Would Automate War
Mass surveillance, drone swarms, cyborg soldiers, telekinesis, synthetic organisms, and laser beams will determine future conflict by 2030.
SHARE Monday, December 3, 2007 The Hidden Holocaust-Our Civilizational Crisis Part 2: EXPORTING DEMOCRACY
In part 1, we showed how the modern world system was built on 500 years of genocidal violence against indigenous peoples. In this follow-up, we reveal how this "hidden holocaust" has intensified since 1945, with the birth of a new imperial order. The new "holocaust" is occurring across the "Third World" as you read. One of its latest victims is Iraq, where an Anglo-American "holocaust" has raged for over 90 years.
SHARE Tuesday, October 12, 2010 Terminal Depletion of the World's Mineral Energy Reserves Looms
Dpletion of the world's mineral energy reserves looms imminent - or certainly within the first quarter of this century. It may well signify the end of industrial civilization as we know it, and synchronous failures could permit a convergence of energy, food, and economic crises as early as 2018. But study after study proves that we know what we can do to forge a more sustainable world. It is high time for a great transition.
SHARE Friday, October 1, 2010 The Real ClimateGate, Part 2: Why the IPCC stands stronger than ever
The second and final part of my Real ClimateGate series, systematically dissecting the prominent 'sceptic' claims alleging the invalidity and corruption of the IPCC, from AmazonGate to GlacierGate to PachauriGate, and beyond.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 21, 2010 The End of the World-as-we-know-it in 10 years? And the rise of the post-carbon era...
We are running out of time. Without urgent transformative action, global ecological, economic and energy crises are likely to converge and mutually accelerate over the coming decades. By 2018, converging food, water and energy shortages could magnify the probability of conflict between major powers, civil wars, and cross-border conflicts. After 2020, this could result in industrial failure and institutional collapse.
(5 comments) SHARE Friday, January 1, 2016 Terror, climate chaos, financial crisis are the costs of 'doing business'
The techno-narcissism of predatory neoliberal capitalism is locked into an endless war with the bastard monster of its own creation, Islamist militant supremacism.
Both ideologies believe they represent "civilisation". Both are merely fractured mirror images, reflecting a deeper Crisis of Civilisation.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, May 11, 2010 Well and Truly Hung: Fiscal Foolishness and Crisis Convergence
We need to start thinking outside the two/three-party box of conventional political business-as-usual if we're to avert global systemic collapse, due to the convergence of economic crisis, peak oil and runaway global warming.
SHARE Monday, May 14, 2007 Blair's Legacy... Violent Extremism
Blair resigned hot on the heels of a criminal investigation into financial corruption at the heart of his govt. An investigation that could be compromised by the same man, Attorney-General Lord Goldsmith, who helped Blair launch a new episode in the Protracted Holocaust in Iraq by advising that War would be legal without the UN. Thanks in part to Blair, the number of dead Iraqis has risen to 8 million.
SHARE Sunday, June 25, 2017 Theresa May's counter-extremism plan will create an incompetent police state
Theresa May's response to the upsurge of violence that has hit Britain since the beginning of 2017 will fail for one fundamental reason: she refuses to hold her own government to account for its systematic incubation of extremism.
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, January 26, 2009 Obama: Regime Rotation
Obama is here to rehabilitate US hegemony, not end it. And he's doing a great job, confusing the progressive community and making all the right noises about torture, rendition and Guantanamo - but in truth, a glimpse at his national security and economic policies shows it's going to be more Business-as-Usual. This time with a smiley face, to make us all feel better about it.
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, October 2, 2006 Pakistan and the Terror Nexus
The leak of an intelligence report from a UK defence ministry-run think--tank shows that a key ally of the Anglo-American Axis in the "War on Terror", Pakistan, is complicit in the very terrorism it purports to be fighting. The chorus of official denial raises disturbing questions.
SHARE Friday, February 29, 2008 The Crisis of Perception
Underlying our crises of energy depletion, runaway climate catastrophe, escalating conflict and rampant corporatism, is more than just a crisis of values -- it is a fundamental crisis of perception; the failure of the global system reflects our failure to understand who, where and why we are. But a paradigm shift in the physical sciences is pushing us toward a perspective of life that is holistic, ethical and interconnected.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, February 9, 2009 EU-Russia Gas Crisis in Retrospective: Prelude to Resource Wars
The EU-Russia gas crisis, supposedly now over, was the prelude to future geopolitical contests and potentially resource wars, between the US, Russia and Europe, to dominate Central Asian resources. Increasing scarcities of Russian conventional oil and natural gas will exacerbate a major energy crisis for Europe in coming years, and heighten US efforts to exert its regional supremacy.
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 22, 2015 Paris Attacks and Climate Change Push Us to Fix a World of Broken Systems
In much the same way that 9/11 saw the birth of a new era of perpetual war in the Muslim world, the 11/13 Paris attacks are giving rise to a new phase in that perpetual war: a relentless state of emergency, in which citizens are expected, in the words of British Home Secretary Theresa May, to possess "vigilance"--a euphemism for constant paranoia, suspicion, and fear in their everyday dealings with other citizens.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 12, 2006 Interrogating 9/11: No Theory, Just Facts
Five years after 9/11, does questioning the official narrative really amount to nothing other than conspiraloonery? Or is there something more going on? Beneath the weird pet theories and absurd speculations, disturbing and significant anomalies remain unresolved.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, June 25, 2010 McChrystal Falls: Another Casualty of a War We're Losing
McChrystal's fall from grace is symptomatic of the monumental and escalating quagmire that constitutes the Anglo-American war in Afghanistan, a war that the US Army's own experts believe is being lost. Obama needs to re-think the US relationship with the Pakistani ISI, which is, as the White House knows well, actually sponsoring the insurgency under our noses.
SHARE Friday, February 12, 2010 Neocons: They Live
Neoconservative ideology and policy discourse continues to dominate both the White House and the airwaves, despite Obama's pledges. Part of the reason is the embeddedness of neocon pundits throughout the mainstream media. Their job is to crank up the fear. And their impact is counter-democratic.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 10, 2006 To Veil or Not to Veil: Is that the Question?
Jack Straw's opportunistic pronouncements about British Muslim women who freely choose to veil their face, veils the far deeper and entrenched causes of community separation and polarisation -- caused not by wearing a piece of cloth -- but by the institutionally racist policies of New Labour. One also wonders about Straw's ommission of massive repression of Muslim women under US-occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan.
(8 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 25, 2007 The Hidden Holocaust--Our Civilizational Crisis Part 1: The Holocaust in History
There is a holocaust going on, as you read. It simmers beneath the surface of current events. In fact, it's being going on for over 500 years. Globalization is, to be more precise, the legacy of a 500-year global killing machine. And we are its benefactors. This is the first in a series of articles on the global crises afflicting our civilization, past and present.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 12, 2010 Coalition of the Willing - The "New Politics" of Cameron and Clegg, and Our Responsibility
UK: Lib Dems in bed with the Tories - have they sold their soul to the devil? Well, there's still lots to worry about, and lots to be annoyed about, but a detailed review of the new coalition govt's pledges is surprisingly... well, uplifting. it's not all bad. no really.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, April 30, 2010 Election Saturation
Is it just me, or is it just getting too much now? The constant talk, so-called "expert analysis', endless trite journalistic commentary, minute probing of every possible element of the party leaders' purported personalities, cameras and microphones extended ruthlessly into every conceivable party-political orifice, and all of this played over and over again ad nauseum.
SHARE Wednesday, July 7, 2010 7/7, Terror and Torture: Protecting the Deep State
It is the five-year anniversary of the 7th July 2005 London tube bombings, yet the new government's latest missives are designed to quash an independent inquiry into those attacks, while thwarting a chance that official complicity in torture will see the light of day in the courts. The deep state is moving, fast, to protect itself through damage-control.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 19, 2006 Ex-UK intel official says liquid explosive claims 'fiction'
British Army explosives expert reveals that the august "terror plot" was an impossible fraud, that has played into the hands of a disturbing Anglo-American political agenda for social control at home and military repression abroad. Other sources reveal that the authorities continue to protect known al-Qaeda terrorist networks.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, May 11, 2007 Inside the Crevice: 7/7 and the Security Debacle
British security services are congratulating themselves over the conviction of five British Muslims on terrorism charges. Meanwhile Blair continues to refuse an independent public inquiry into the London bombings. But new evidence is now emerging of how much the government has lied about its relationship to terrorists prior to the 7th July 2005 attacks.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, July 6, 2007 WHOSE BOMBS?
Anomalies, inconsistencies and lies plague British and American official accounts of the "terror" incidents sparked since Friday 29 June. The lack of Western casualties contrasts with NATO simultaneous civilian massacres in Afghanistan and Iraq. But worse, credible sources reveal astonishing links between al-Qaeda networks in the Middle East and the Bush administration; and a gut-wrenching plan to provoke a resource war.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 8, 2008 Peak Food: Blaming the Victims
As food prices rise, the blame game begins. Consumers, Third World breeding, the unrestrained CO2 emissions of irresponsible individuals, among other miscreants, are frequently pinpointed -- almost everyone except the real culprits: the global corporate food industry. Welcome to a dangerous, escalatingly expensive new era of food scarcity --from which even us Westerners have no escape.
SHARE Friday, June 13, 2008 42 Days: Creeping Internment in the UK
The British state's attempt to push through detention without charge for 42 days is a precursor to a plan to impose indefinite internment, targeted disproportionately against Muslims and ethnic minorities.