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Victoria, Poldark, and Brexit Cultural Nationalism

Victoria, Poldark, and Brexit cultural nationalism

The recent drama, Victoria (2016-2019) on Netflix based on the life of Queen Victoria is an elaborate, well-made and well-acted series, all the better to convince one of the authenticity of its content.

Victoria was presented as a young queen who was always concerned with the interests of not only her adoring public but with the staff who worked in her palace.

However, this all starts to break down in an episode that dealt with the horrors of the Great Hunger raging in Ireland in 1847.

Victoria

Image: Victoria ITV Intertitle

How Power is Silently Being Seized

Sleepwalking into Tyranny

This is what militaries do during coups: you capture the major targets, with government buildings high on the list, and you take over communications and other systems.

— Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian on fascism and authoritarian leaders

How something is done is just as important as why something is done.

To suggest that the ends justify the means is to launch oneself down a moral, ethical and legal rabbit hole that leaves us in a totalitarian bind.

We are already halfway down that road.

Whatever the justifications for discarding, even temporarily, the constitutional framework and protocols that have long served as the foundations for our …

No Denying a Holocaust

Another name for a crime against humnaity.

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons Provides a Way to Avert Nuclear Catastrophe

Will the world ever be free of the menace of nuclear annihilation?

There was a promising start along these lines during the late twentieth century, when―pressed by a popular upsurge against nuclear weapons―the nations of the world adopted a succession of nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements.  Starting with the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, these agreements helped curb the nuclear arms race and prevent nuclear war.

But the tide gradually turned during the final years of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first.  As international conflict heightened and the nuclear disarmament movement waned, additional nations …

Renaming the Gulf of Mexico Isn’t a Laughing Matter but Part of a U.S. Imperialist Power Grab

Trump’s executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” isn’t just another absurd stunt or another example of his outlandish behavior. It signals a much deeper, more troubling agenda that seeks to erase historical identity and assert imperial domination over a region already suffering under a long history of interventionist policies. At its core, this is a move to expand the U.S. empire by erasing Mexico’s presence from a geographical feature recognized for centuries.
The name “Gulf of Mexico” has existed since the 16th century. Its recognition is supported by international organizations such as the …

Why Fly in Europe? The Dark Triumph of the Ryanair Effect

It has had a rebarbative, blighting effect across the entire aviation industry.  The Ryanair model, for want of a better term, prides itself on minimal, no-frills service for eye popping prices.  The Irish-based low-cost carrier was intended to revolutionise European air travel by offering a budget option for the eager and easy holiday maker.  In time, this seemingly attractive option has become a handy model to emulate by more traditional airlines, who have become mere shadows of themselves. National carriers, in other words, are now shameful replicas of budget airlines, with one exception: prices have been kept high and, post …

Life Isn’t All Archetypes, Just Most of It

Recently, a man had the audacity to tell me that “not everyone is an archetype.” By saying this, he earned himself a place as The Bastard. You read that right, one of the eight characters of comedy, as detailed in the brilliant book by Scott Sedita. And guess what? Everyone fits somewhere, because everyone is mentally challenged to some extent.

For instance, my current screenwriting tutor, a man who told me I couldn’t write a story about a doctor being a villain because doctors are bound by the Hippocratic Oath, falls neatly into The Dumb One category. My previous screenwriting tutor, …

Suffering an Epidemic of Prostate Cancer

Now all men are to be denied universal screening

After decades of a prostate cancer epidemic and a refusal to screen Black men, who suffer a 60% higher incidence than White men, the highest in the industrialized world, physicians are now advocating refusal to screen ALL men.

The American Cancer Society writes, “Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men in the US. It’s also the second leading cause of cancer death.  About 1 in 8 men will get prostate cancer in their lifetime.”  Knowing these facts about the cancer epidemic, The American Family Physician (AFP) has just published an editorial that calls on physicians to STOP …

What Name Is Best?

What should we name our cell phones?

Venezuelan President Maduro Assumes a Third Term

Prospects and Problematics

Roger D. Harris views wanted poster for González at the Caracas airport. Photo: Roger Harris.

The first thing greeting me as I disembarked from my flight in Caracas was a wanted poster for one Edmundo González Urrutia. The reward was $100,000. Not to be outdone, the US had slapped a $25 million bounty on the head of President Maduro and lesser amounts on other Venezuelan leaders.

Both González and the …

Failed Peacekeeper?

Throughout the election campaign US President Donald Trump often claimed that Biden’s administration made a lot of mistakes while in power. Many of them, according to Trump, just fueled the flame of the protracted war between Russia and Ukraine. The US President and his supporters fiercely condemned the Democrats for numerous aid packages, that, from their point of view, not only pulled the opposing sides away from negotiations but also damaged the American economy. In his speeches Trump systematically stressed his intention to bring an end to the conflict in a very short time by halting military aid to Ukraine …

Livin’ La Vida Loca

America in confusion

Waking up, day after day, and seeing continuous disasters visited upon the Palestinian people forecasts a day of facing the light at an increasingly dark level. It is impossible to be unaware of the genocide; yet an entire nation reinforces it. The American people are disposed to the sufferings its government inflicts upon others.

Election of an authoritarian to the highest office, who appoints cabinet positions with qualifications that require little experience in government affairs and extensive experience in extramarital affairs, completes the mystification. Elise Stefanik, selected as America’s representative to the United Nations, agrees to the proposition that …

U.S.-led Imperialism Is Directly Responsible for Turmoil in the Democratic Republic of Congo

The Black Alliance for Peace Africa Team (BAP) and U.S. Out of Africa Network (USOAN) stands in unwavering solidarity with the Congolese People as they endure yet another chapter of violence, exploitation, and masked imperialist aggression in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The ongoing conflict, fueled by Rwanda’s role as an imperialist foot soldier, is not merely a regional dispute but a manifestation of global capitalism’s insatiable desire for Africa’s resources. As the transnational capitalist class fight for dominance in the global clean energy, artificial intelligence, and technology markets, the Congo has been and stands to remain the …

An Israeli Soldier and a Palestinian Fighter Make Peace

Rotem and Osama with rosesAs Rotem Levin tossed a grenade into the middle of a Palestinian village in the West Bank, he didn’t realize his life would change forever.

“I thought I was fulfilling my duty to my country,” he told me over video chat. “I had never questioned what I had been raised to believe.”

Rotem wore a pink and gray vertically striped linen shirt and his hair was short enough to make it look like his head had been recently shaved. He looked like the Jews in the …

The Rise of the Immortal Dictator

If one company or small group of people manages to develop godlike digital superintelligence, they could take over the world. At least when there’s an evil dictator, that human is going to die. But for an AI, there would be no death. It would live forever. And then you’d have an immortal dictator from which we can never escape.

— Elon Musk (2018)

The Deep State is about to go turbocharged.

While the news media fixates on the extent to which Project 2025 may be the Trump Administration’s playbook for locking down …

DeepSeek Is Showing Us that Another Tech World Is Possible

How one Chinese company’s AI tool has slashed trillions from the US stock market, and revealed a future for technology without American tech hegemony

Last week, a Chinese startup, DeepSeek, released R1, a large-language model rivaling ChatGPT, that is already unraveling the U.S. tech world. The open-source model performs just as well, if not better, than its American counterparts.
The shock comes mainly from the extremely low cost with which the model was trained. R1 cost just $5.6 million to train. Meanwhile, OpenAI spent at least $540 million to train ChatGPT in 2022 last year alone and plans to spend over $500 billion in the next four years. Meanwhile, Meta revealed it plans to…

Trump, Tariffs and Russia: A Very Muddled Policy

It has become something of a fixation in the Donald Trump war chest of options that cowing, discomforting and baffling his various counterparts on the international scene with tariffs is bound to work at every corner.  Certainly, when it comes to allies, the potency of such announcements is magnified.  Nation states, confusing common interests with friendship, have dreams broken before the call of firm, sober diplomacy.

When it comes to dealing with Russia, though, the matter of tariffs sits oddly.  In 2024, US imports of Russian goods came in at US$2.8 billion.  What is imported from Russia is certainly of …

A Choice: Submit to Trump’s Ridicule and Tariffs or Seek Win-Win Trade Relations

A widely known caution advises people not to put all their eggs in one basket.

An exemplar is Canada. Has Canada put too many of its eggs in its basket of trade with the United States?

Of course, Canada’s trade is not completely reliant on the United States, but it has cast its lot so much into the American camp that it has cut off or damaged opportunities to diversify its trade. As the junior partner, population-wise, in the trade partnership, Canada’s sovereignty and national dignity are being impugned in full view of …

How Gaza Changes Everything

While the bombs have gone silent in Gaza, there is something that has fundamentally changed about the world as we know it, and about ourselves. The fragile assumptions on which most of us had constructed our worldview have fallen apart. So many things we took for given have been rendered questionable and uncertain. So much about our own selves has been laid bare before the mirror that Gaza holds up to us. The carefully crafted façade of modernity has turned out to be a dystopian abyss we cannot make sense of. Gaza has told us loud and clear that the …

Zionism is Far-Right Bigotry, Hate of “the Other,” and Supremacy

Eliding a far-right racist’s own religious heritage

They are trying to elevate France recognizing Josephine Baker as a hero, yet, Amy Goodman has the ability — and whatever else is going on with the Black journalist she interviews, French journalist Rokhaya Diallo — to sidestep the tribal and religious and historical and intellectual identity of this French monster, Éric Zemmour (above image).

He’s Jewish and he openly uses his Jewishness as a cuddle to get where he is today — …

Zionism: Jews and Penguins

Zionists have sought to delegitimize Palestinian opposition to Zionism or Jewish settler-colonialization of their lands, by accusing them of antisemitism, that is, of harboring hatred for Jews as such, not because of what they had/have been doing to Palestinians.

Yahweh gave Palestine to the Jews in perpetuity: thus the story goes in the ancient literature of the Hebrews as recorded some 2,500 years ago in Genesis. Why would the Palestinians refuse to handover their country to the ‘original’ Ashkenazi title-holders to Palestine: if not for their hatred of Jews – if not for their inveterate hatred of Jews? Is there be …

Can the Internet Wage Peace? Amidst a Push for War, Chinese and American Citizens Connect Online

With the Tiktok ban just days away, American youth have started flooding the Chinese social media app RedNote, pushing it into #1 position on the app store. Labeled “Tiktok refugees” by Chinese netizens, the newcomers have been welcomed by app users with open arms, curiosity, and a fair bit of humor.

Though initially confused at the sudden influx of English speakers, long-dwelling app users quickly connected the dots and were quick to poke fun at the US government’s accusations of China spying on your typical American …

Bitter Harvests: The Gaza Ceasefire

Twinning the terms “ceasefire” and “Gaza” seems not only incongruous but an obscene joke.  This is largely because the ceasefire announced on January 15 between Israel and Hamas could have been reached so much earlier by all the concerned parties.  But will was lacking in Washington to force Israel’s hand, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was repeatedly of the belief that Hamas had to be unconditionally defeated, if not extirpated altogether, for any such arrangements to be reached.

A general outline of the ceasefire terms was released by Qatar, a vital broker in the talks between Hamas and Israel.  …

Jewish Supremacy is a Bigger Problem than Antisemitism

Fifteen months into Israel’s holocaust some leftists continue to uphold Jewish supremacy. Many supposedly on the side of humanity continue to boost an ideological stick enabling a genocide, authoritarianism and a movement promoting “mass deportation”.

Recently Caitlin Johnstone posted: “First end the active genocide, THEN talk to me about your concerns regarding a rise in antisemitism. This isn’t one of those ‘we can walk and chew gum at the same time’ things. No, we absolutely cannot, because ‘antisemitism’ is used to deflect criticism of the genocide. Even if everything Israel defenders are saying about rising antisemitism was true (and it most …

They All Are Lord of the Flies Children at Heart

goal is to have a BIG Israel, according to Academy Award holder Zelensky

forty hard years of lobotomizing, dumbdowning, infantilizing, and deploying this multilayered PSYOPS of direct and covert operations have been brought to us, partially, by the Edward Bernays of the World … now we are here: Fear and Loathing in Our Delusional and Self-Incriminating Selves! (Haeder, May 28, 2023)

Animal Farm Politics: The Deep State Wins Again

It cost the American taxpayer $24 million to find out what we knew all along: politics is corrupt.

After four years of being subjected to special prosecutor Jack Smith’s dogged investigation into alleged election interference by Donald Trump, the Justice Department has concluded that Trump would have been convicted of breaking the law if only he hadn’t gotten re-elected.

In other words, the Deep State wins again.

The revelation here is not that Trump broke the law but the extent to which sitting presidents get a free pass when it comes to misconduct.

None of this is news.

The Deep State has been …

How the West Destroyed Syria

Peter Ford served in the UK Foreign Ministry for many years including being UK Ambassador to Bahrein (1999-2003) and  then Syria (2003-2006).  Following that, he was representative to the Arab world for the Commissioner General of United Nations Relief and Works Agency.  He was interviewed by Rick Stering on Jan 6, 2025.

Rick Sterling:  Why do you think the Syrian military and government collapsed so rapidly?

Peter Ford: Everybody was surprised but with hindsight, we shouldn’t have been. Over more than a decade, the Syrian army had been hollowed out by the extremely dire economic situation in Syria, mainly caused by western …

Dissident Voice in Temporary Abeyance

With the passing of DV editor Angie Tibbs, the password that she had passed on with her. Currently, the DV host server is making it difficult for DV to publish. DV is caught in a catch 22 courtesy of its server which states that a change of contact be made from the email of the contact. This would be the deceased Angie Tibbs, pointing out the futility and absurdity of strictly sticking to such a stipulation. The need for website security is appreciated, nevertheless, it is hoped that reason will win out and the change of contact will be approved …

Only Force Will Stop Genocide

We have long passed the point of mobilizing world opinion against Israel’s shameless and wanton slaughter of countless defenseless civilian Palestinian men, women, children and even the unborn. They are countless because no one has the means to count those whose bodies have never been recovered, who have starved or frozen to death far from the tabulators, those who have died from diseases that do not exist among populations that have access to the most basic necessities of life, those whose weakened bodies must contend with rain mixing with raw sewage flooding a field of humanity herded into ever-smaller unprotected …

Ending Yoon Suk Yeol’s Legacy of Betrayal and Dismantlement of Korea’s Sovereignty

For more than 44 hours Koreans have braved freezing snowstorms to demand the arrest of the elusive Yoon Seok Yoel, who has barricaded himself inside his official residence in defiance of constitutional and legal authority.  Yoon, extolled by Washington as a “champion of democracy,” has vanished from public view behind hastily erected barricades manned by security and military personnel while ignoring repeated summons from both the anti-corruption and prosecution services. Capping a monthlong standoff with the National Assembly, and the Korean public over his brazen attempted coup, …