David Swanson asked me to write about Kiribati after I wrote to him to point out Costa Rica is not the only “full-fledged and totally independent country to be entirely demilitarised.” Kiribati, and other small countries I suspect, have no military. In Kiribati’s case this was a deliberate decision taken by the first President and Government of Kiribati as it was becoming Independent in 1979. Like Costa Rica it has almost certainly benefitted from that foundational decision. Many other newly independent ex British colonies suffered from coups and …
Living theater poses crucial questions about consequences of war and potential to abolish it
by Kathy Kelly / November 20th, 2024
Art work by Robert Shetterly, taken from the playbill for “Reap What You Sow”
In mid-November, New York’s Catholic Worker community, located in lower Manhattan, opened their sizable auditorium to host “Reap What You Sow: Don’t Lose Heart!” a two act play with two actors which debuted, for two nights, on the Maryhouse stage.
Prior to the performance, preparations included selecting the sturdiest wooden chairs for audience seating, carefully cleaning furniture and floors, and rearranging the space so the next issue of the Catholic Worker newspaper, stacked and ready to …
In August 2021, following the withdrawal of major U.S./NATO military forces from Afghanistan after two decades of occupation, Taliban forces took effective control over the country. In response, the United States seized the assets of Afghanistan’s central bank totaling around $7 billion. Half of that amount was transferred to the misleadingly named “Afghan Fund” in September 2022, a Swiss-based “charitable foundation” whose only role thus far has been to privately conceal and invest the funds without any concrete plans to return them, as confirmed by U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan Thomas West. …
A Farewell to Virology Dr. Mark Bailey’s comprehensive essay, “A Farewell to Virology,” is a scathing critique of the virus model and virology as a whole. The expert edition, published in July 2024, presents a compelling case against the scientific community’s claims about viruses causing disease. According to Bailey, the evidence supporting this notion is lacking, and virology has consistently failed to meet its own requirements.
Key Points Virology’s virus model is flawed and lacks scientific backing for its claims about …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / November 20th, 2024
That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary.
—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
This is how it begins.
This is how it always begins, justified in the name of national security.
Mass roundups. Raids. Indefinite detentions in concentration camps. Martial law. The erosion of habeas corpus protections. The suspension of the Constitution, at least for select segments of the population. A hierarchy of rights, contingent on whether you belong to a favored political class.
This is what you can expect in the not-so-distant future.
Nearly all of these quotes are gathered from the chapter epigraphs in the book, M. Shahid Alam, Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism (Springer: 2008). A few of the quotes are from non-Zionists. The sources for most these quotes can be found in this book.
Chosenness
“Israel is not another example of the species nation; it is the only example of the species Israel.” Martin Buber
“Only Israel lives in, and constitutes, God’s kingdom…” Jacob Neusner
“For me the supreme morality is that the Jewish people has a right to exist. Without that there is no morality in the world.” Golda Meier, 1967
COP29 was always going to be memorable, for no other reason than the hosting country, Azerbaijan, is a petrostate indifferent to the issue of emissions and scornful of ecological preachers. It has seen its natural gas supply grow by 128% between 2000 and 2021. Between 2006 and 2021, gas exports rose by a monumental 29,290%. A dizzying 95% of the country’s exports are made up of oil and gas, with much of its wealth failing to trickle down to the rest of the populace.
The broadly described West, as stated by President Ilham Aliyev in his opening address to …
Rick Perlstein’s 2020 bestseller Reaganland is a must read for many reasons. First and foremost this 900 or so pages book reads like a novel. Perlstein is that great a storyteller. He covers the rise of the right wing in our nation, focusing from Jimmy Carter’s 1976-1980 presidency to Ronald Reagan’s nomination in 1980. As one reads on it is apparent that Donald Trump copied more than just Reagan’s Make America Great Again campaign slogan. Amazing how after almost 50 years nothing has really changed in Amerika. This writer never realized, for instance, that the 1980 Republican …
There’s a new trend in the world that’s working against the planet, you know, the one you’re standing on. This new trend, over the past year or so, spells “thumbs down” for planet Earth. It’s a disheartening, and fraught with danger, change in attitude, dismissing commitments, left and right.
A figurative Planet Support Switch has been turned off by several key players. Proof of this agnostic attitude is found in every meeting of nations of the world over the past couple of years. They are turning their noses up on prior commitments. This is a new attitude. And it’s happening as …
This November, US president Joe Biden will leave office with the world in turmoil and US fingerprints on the bodies of untold thousands across the globe: in Gaza and Lebanon, Yemen and Syria, Cuba and Venezuela, Pakistan and Haiti, and elsewhere.
While Biden attempted to cast his foreign policy actions as defending “democracy” against “authoritarianism,” this framing is a lie. The real motive force behind the Biden administration’s bloody foreign policy is a fear of waning hegemony – of losing the benefits the US economy derives from political and economic domination of the global majority.
The attack was a British operation not a Russian one
by John Helmer / November 18th, 2024
Yulia Skripal communicated from her bedside at Salisbury District Hospital on March 8, 2018, four days after she and her father Sergei Skripal collapsed from a poison attack, that the attacker used a spray; and that the attack took place when she and her father were eating at a restaurant just minutes before their collapse on a bench outside.
The implication of the Skripal evidence, revealed for the first time on Thursday, is that the attack on the Skripals was not perpetrated by Russian military agents who were photographed elsewhere in Salisbury town at the time; that the attacker or attackers …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / November 18th, 2024
Rubio and Trump during a break in the 2016 presidential debate. AP photo.
Of all Trump’s choices for his foreign policy team, Marco Rubio is the least controversial to the neoconservative foreign policy establishment in Washington, and the most certain to provide continuity with all that is wrong with U.S. foreign policy, from Cuba to the Middle East to China.
The only area where there might be some hope for ending a war is Ukraine, where Rubio has come close to Donald Trump’s position, praising Ukraine for standing up to Russia, but …
News outlets didn’t make a mistake. They knowingly aired disinformation and peddled fake news. Admitting that requires a troubling recalibration of perspective if we’re ever to make sense of the world
by Jonathan Cook / November 18th, 2024
The media’s role in peddling disinformation over last week’s violence in Amsterdam just keeps getting darker.
Owen Jones has interviewed a Dutch woman who shot the footage used by major outlets – from Sky News and the BBC to the Guardian and New York Times – to suggest that locals in Amsterdam carried out “antisemitic attacks” on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans.
In fact, as she has noted on social media, her footage shows the exact reverse: Israeli fans attacking local Dutch residents.
On 25 July 1945, U.S. President Harry Truman accepted the advices from both his personal hero General Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill, to 100% reverse his predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s carefully designed plan to prevent a WW3 by creating a fully armed democratic federal government of the world to create adjudicate and enforce international laws and NO national laws, and to outlaw and end the cause that had produced both World Wars, which was imperialism and the contests between them, and so he created the basis for what he named …
Two more United Nations committee resolutions. Both concerning the conduct of Israel past and current. While disease, hunger and death continue to stalk the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank remains under the thick thumb of occupation, deliberations in foreign fora continue to take place about how to address this hideous state of affairs. While these international matters can often seem like insipid gestures marked by ineffectual chatter, they are increasingly bulking a file that is making Israel more isolated than ever. And this is not an isolation of virtue or admiration.
On November 13, the Second Committee (Economic and Financial) …
On August 11, 2022, workers in Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) penned an open letter about their experiences in the program. “As it currently stands,” they wrote, “the [SAWP] is systematic slavery.” The article was written by Jamaican workers, but they asserted that migrants of other nationalities had faced similarly dehumanizing experiences. “It feels like we’re in prison,” they continued. “[Bosses] physically intimidate us, destroy our personal property, and threaten to send us home.” Workers were “treated like mules” by unaccountable companies that the Canadian government had empowered to repress migrant workers’ labour rights and political voice.
After election defeats, political writers are quick to explain that if only the politicians had read my book and followed my advice, things would have been different for our side.
If candidates opposed to reactionary authoritarian nationalism had advocated the positions I endorse, Trump and like-minded Republicans still would have won control of all three branches of the US government. But at least Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party, and …
The Green New Deal has been largely blocked at the national level, but it is thriving in communities, cities, and states. Jeremy Brecher’s new book is both an urgent call to action and proof of concept.
Starting where we’re at
Less than one week after Trump was re-elected to the single most powerful political office in the world, it seems like a horrible time to release a book about the Green New Deal.
Thinking back to 2018, not so long ago in time but perhaps much longer in space, to when the Green New Deal was launched into public attention as a bold …
Imagine an experienced Ukrainian surgeon breaking down in front of a committee of British MPs as he related how Russian forces had been deliberately targeting Ukrainian children.
Imagine the surgeon had had to operate in desperate conditions on young children who had been lying injured after a Russian bombing attack and who were then ‘picked off’ by Russian drones. The atrocity claims would be headline news all across Western media.
Here, in the real world, the horrific testimony of a British surgeon who had operated on children in …
The Biblical Book of Job chronicles a string of catastrophes relentlessly plaguing the main character, Job, who loses his prosperity, his home, his health, and his children. Eventually, an agonized Job curses his own existence as well as the god that created him.
Numerous interpretations of the story exist, and more than one version has circulated through the ancient Near East. One version concludes with Job avowing repentance. “I know that my redeemer liveth, and so I repent in dust and in ashes.”
It is hard to credit one of the least impressive Secretary of States the United States has ever produced with any merit other than being a plasterwork that, from time to time, moved with caution on the world stage for fear of cracking. On the stage, Antony Blinken’s brittle performances have been nothing short of unimpressive, notably in pursuing such projects comically titled “Peace in the Middle East.” Each time he has ventured to various regions of the world, the combatants seem keener than ever to continue taking up arms or indulging in slaughter.
On this day in Anarchist History, November 14 1909, we remember young Simón Radowitzky and his assassination of Colonol Falcón, the head of the federal police in Argentina.
Colonel Falcón rose through the ranks of the military by conducting genocide and enslaving Mapuche and other Indigenous People in Patagonia and brought those same skills to Buenos Aires where he brutally repressed anarchists.
After assassinating Falcón, Radowitzky was tortured and jailed for 22 years but that didn’t stop him from continuing to lead a …
Just in time for the COP29 summit, where a group of self-congratulatory world leaders will meet in Baku, Azerbaijan for photo-ops, catered meals, and of course discussion of climate goals that they don’t intend to meet, subMedia, in collaboration with Peter Gelderloos, is pleased to release part one of a three part series: It’s Revolution or Death.
The first installment of the series takes a look at the push for green capitalism, and questions the common-sense assumptions of its cheerleaders. Bolstered by unwavering, uncritical support from NGO’s, energy corporations portray themselves as cutting edge innovators in green energy technology while hedging …
I have no blindingly insightful analysis to offer about Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party and the establishment portion of the Republican Party but here’s my tentative take: The presidential election wasn’t a vote for fascism or even a vote for Trump. My sense is that a sizable number of voters were saying “I don’t like Trump and I know my life won’t be better under him — but I’m voting for him or not voting at all.”
White folks in rural Iowa, Black voters in Detroit and Puerto Ricans in nearly Allentown found an opportunity to, in the …
