According to latest numbers, 60 million people have been displaced due to violence and inhumane poverty.

In recent months, a major humanitarian catastrophe has made its way into the news—tens of millions, the largest ever recorded by the United Nations, have been forced to take part in a life-threatening journey across land and sea.

While members of the establishment media have used terms such as “swarms” or “tide”, as though they were describing animals or pests, to describe these men, women, and children refugees continue to struggle so that they may gain access to basic human rights, such as stable shelter and food. Islamophobia has also crept its way into reports and into the mouths of politicians, some of whom are refusing to accept Muslim refugees.

Further burdening refugees who are making their way across Europe is the growing right wing. Germany’s National Democratic Party, a neo-Nazi organization, has been responsible for organizing arson at homes of refugees, and leading massive anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim protests. If this wasn’t frightening enough, the NDP is also gaining footholds in the government.

Abby Martin takes us inside the refugee crisis, humanizing the victims, and exposing the parties and people who are using this humanitarian catastrophe in order to push a right wing agenda.

 

Who Is To Blame For The Refugee Crisis?

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Image by Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images

Red-baiting, used to smear individuals and organizations, remains the unofficial religion in capitalist America. Yet little is said about the role socialism played in building a strong labor movement and creating an unshakable anti-war movement.

Not only is this part of U.S. history whitewashed, so is the repression of dissidents before and after McCarthy. Between 1919 and 1920 some 10,000 people were rounded up and thrown in jail during the Palmer raids, notorious for their exceptional brutality.

During the 1920’s, local police departments formed official “Red Squads”, where police intelligence units working with business elites would conduct extensive surveillance; raid meetings, ransack offices and instill fear in workers attempting to unionize. The message was clear: anyone who considered joining a socialist group would be met with unyielding violence.

The war on this idea intensified in 1947, when the House Committee on Un-American Activities began targeting high profile public officials and members of the entertainment industry who were alleged to be Red. Anti-communism in the 1940’s and 1950’s reached such a degree of terror that 5,000 communists were forced to flee the country, and more than 1,000 went to prison.

In this edition of The Empire Files Abby Martin exposes not only the oft-ignored history of the American Left, but examines how the Empire remains just as vociferous in its attempts to snuff out any and all socialist traditions.

 

America’s Unofficial Religion — The War On An Idea

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Saudi Arabia, one of the region’s most sectarian and intensely brutal regimes, happens to be one of the United State’s greatest allies. The history hidden behind the Saudi kingdom’s steel curtain reveals the existence of a world power that is both restrictive and unflinching in its violence, and thanks to help from the UK, the notorious human rights abuser now heads the United Nations Human Rights Council.

The oil giant not only subjects local Shia Muslims to hostile policies, it also extends systematic, merciless abuse to migrants who already face countless obstacles while attempting to work in the region. Yemen, one of the most food insecure countries in the world, is also being subjected to the kingdom’s wrath. As countless Yemenis starve under relentless Saudi bombing, the US is militarily backing the war, having just approved $1.3 billion more in arms to the monarchy.

Fearful of losing its grip on power in the region, the Saudi kingdom, which is part of the larger, archaic band of Gulf monarchies, actively hunts down and executes dissidents who are part of a local Arab Spring—but it is clear that Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, despite how much violence it unleashes, is doomed to fail.

In this episode of The Empire Files, Abby Martin exposes Saudi Arabia—not only its rampant brutality, but the resistance that exists despite the kingdom’s relentless attempts to crush it.

 

 Saudi Arabia’s Hidden Revolution & Crushing of Resistance

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