Millions of parents and at-risk young people facing a draft would, like Margery Taylor Greene, be shouting, “Over my dead body!!!!”
by Dave Lindorff / March 13th, 2026
Driving home from my coffee at the local food co-op in a suburb just north of Philadelphia, I passed by the gas station at the local 7-ll store. Now owned by a Japanese company, 7-11 is one of the largest gas chains in the US.
I found myself thinking how back in the early years of this century, when Venezuela was headed by the hugely popular radical leftist President Hugo Chavez, a brash and charismatic former junior officer in the Venezuelan Army who was elected and re-elected four times to …
“One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it — it was the black kitten’s fault entirely.”
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
by Edward Curtin / March 13th, 2026
Anyone who is not sick at heart and raging over the slaughter of over 165 young Iranian girls at a school by the American-Israeli monsters waging war on Iran is depraved and evil. It sickens me to state something so obvious, but I am afraid it is true that many are not distraught by the news. A nod to “how terrible” and on with the war is a common response for those who even know about it, not just because of moral indifference, but because of the acceleration of digital news reporting that disappears today before it has become tomorrow. …
DV coeditor Faramarz Farbod, who teaches Political Science at Moravian University, is the guest on Berks Community TV’s “Centering on Peace” program. In this episode titled “Origins of the Current US/Israeli War on Iran,” Farbod traces the origins of the current war from the beginnings of the 20th Century to today. The host is John Hoskyns-Abrahall. The program was recorded on March 9 and aired on March 10.
Not so long ago, the Iran war could still be treated as a “shock” to the system—a sudden, violent anomaly that spooked traders, sent a few charts vertical, then, we were told, would be absorbed. Oil would spike and settle. Gasoline would lurch higher and then ease. Fertilizer prices would jump and “normalize.” Shipping would reroute. The machine would shudder, spit smoke, and then grind on.
By mid‑March, that story already sounds tired. The Strait of Hormuz is not just “at risk”; it is intermittently choked, with tankers idling or turning away …
The geopolitical genie is out of the bottle: by capitalizing on geography to disrupt global trade, countries can strengthen their strategic position at relatively low cost.
With each day of glorified actions against Iran, with each cloudy press session claiming supreme success through sheer force, the Trump administration is struggling to keep up appearances. Through an approach of existential attrition, the clerical regime in Tehran is now causing shocks and tingles in the global market, striking where influence is strongest: the petrol …
You may know that in Macedonia the academic disciplines of international relations, geopolitics, and international security were introduced long after the breakup of Yugoslavia. Everything started from scratch, and I would say that these fields are still in their infancy. With rare exceptions. In global terms, we are Lilliputians. Our academic community is small, our resources limited, and our institutional infrastructure fragile. Yet when I watch television debates where journalists and self-appointed “analysts” confidently discuss grand strategy, nuclear deterrence, or great-power rivalry, I cannot remain indifferent. After all, there …
Jeff J. Brown: Thomas, knowing your erudite expertise on Christianity, I have a question for you:
When did Jews get control of the Vatican?
I know it was at least in 1942, when the Jewish psychopath Rothschild clan created the City of London Vatican Bank.
T.P. Wilkinson: I will check on your query before I give you an answer. However, I think it must have been around the Reformation because the Calvinists are traditionally strong Old Testament followers. There is a theory that Calvin (as opposed to Luther) was crypto-Jewish.
One should consider that both Waldensers and the radical Christians of Southern France (Albigensians/ …
President Trump’s recent attempt to reassure the American public how the war against Iran was going relied on the President’s assertion that the US is winning the war. Relying on the lame claim, the President said “I think the war is very complete, pretty much,” as well as telling Axios that “Any time I want it to end, it will end.”
Speaking from his Doral Florida golf club, the President added that “If they do anything bad, that would be the end of Iran and you’d never hear the name again,” leaving open speculation that the US was prepared to …
In addition to the widening of the war on Iran to the whole Middle East and beyond, this conflict risks deliberate use of nuclear weapons.
by Peter Kuznick and Ivana Nikolic Hughes / March 12th, 2026
President Trump has been on quite a roll.
Since just the beginning of the year, he has kidnapped the Venezuela president, threatened to invade Greenland and Colombia, and has in just the last week dragged the U.S.—and seemingly much of the Middle East—into a new war by joining with Israel to attack Iran, something that even the biggest hawks among recent U.S. presidents have managed to avoid. That’s on top of bombing seven countries in 2025.
The 2024 campaign promises of a peace president who will end the forever wars have evaporated, only to be replaced by unrestrained use of military force and a seeming …
You notice your pulse first. It normally moves quietly, on time, somewhere below your notice. Now it presses forward, beats harder; it has something to say.
The pulse is yours. It doesn’t belong to the drunk guards outside your cell, bent over a rough wooden table, slapping down cards in the dim light. They’re cursing over Aces and Kings, and getting rivered out.
Thunder breaks in the distance. Storm’s coming. You draw a breath. In that small space, something settles.
You win.
The kind of victory that happens quietly. A dream you went after has finally found ground. It lives in you now. It …
In Part One of this planned series of articles, I wrote about the historical timeliness of a ‘third force’ strategy. I said, “This isn’t something pulled out of the air, or someone’s lofty dreams. It is grounded in historical experience in the United States over the last 60 or so years.”
A progressive “third force,” one that is both activist and electoral, that does day-do-day community, workplace and school organizing, that brings together those who see themselves as independents, who are critical of both the dominant sector of the Democratic Party and …
“Put three Cubans in a room together, you’ll have five different opinions,” a Cuban friend of mine likes to joke. He was referring to debates in the town-hall meetings during Cuba’s constitutional convention process of 2018. But I immediately thought, of course, of any Nochebuena celebration at my dad’s house, just a few hundred miles north. Siblings, cousins, babies, abuelas, family, and friends of all ages and political opinions gathered around a brilliant feast. Between the devouring of lechón, yuca, plátanos, and flan, a flurry of back and forth between English and Spanish. Everyone hugging, praying, laughing, and occasionally yelling. …
Seyed Ali Mousavi, the Iranian ambassador to the UK, with Laura Kuenssberg
On 8 March, on the BBC politics programme, Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, the former BBC political editor put these impassioned words to Seyed Ali Mousavi, the Iranian ambassador to the UK:
‘Since we last spoke, your government has killed thousands of its own people in the streets who had the courage to stand up to protest against the suffering that they have been experiencing at the hands of the regime. Thousands of people were killed. …
In late 2020, Beijing did the unthinkable: it attacked its own champions. Trillions in market value vanished, the world’s largest IPO was halted, and entire industries were banned overnight. Western investors called it “economic suicide,” but they were looking at stock prices while China was looking at its society. This episode explains why the “Golden Goose” had to be caged and how China is pivoting from consumer apps to the “Hard Tech” of the future.
US President Donald Trump’s photo is set on fire during a demonstration in front of the American consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, on February 1, 2026 IMAGE/asin Akgul/AFP/Middle East Eye
US-Israel attack Iran
On February 27, 2026, talking with a friend, I mentioned that the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, asked embassy staff to leave Israel. Also, the Reuters report on February 24 stating that Iran will buy Chinese-made CM-302 anti-ship cruise missiles pointed toward an Israel-pushed-US probable strike on Iran that weekend. …
One day, March 8, International Women’s Day just doesn’t do justice for most girls on planet earth in the global south who will not reach womanhood.
Example:
The Israeli-American strike on a school that killed at least 180 children, most of them girls aged between 7 and 12, on the first day of the illegal war on Iran was deliberate.
The Shajereh Tayyebeh (The Good Tree) school in the city of Minab, in Hormozgan province of Iran, near …
How “America First” Became “Israel First, Tehran Next”
by Nolan Higdon / March 11th, 2026
“I am especially proud to be the first president in decades who has started no new wars,” President Donald Trump declared during his 2021 farewell address. Throughout the 2024 campaign and into his second term, Trump consistently branded himself as the “Peace President.” It was a title he maintained even as his administration conducted military strikes, bombings, or specialized operations in at least six different countries.
Benjamin Netanyahu is losing patience. Israel is being battered by Iran’s missiles and drones, while Israel’s defense shield is nearly depleted, and ineffective even when used. They can continue to attack Iran (although it’s often uncertain which attacks are Israeli and which American) but when it comes to Israeli airspace, they are even using anti-aircraft artillery which at least makes it appear that they are putting up a defense. This is despite the fact that Iran is apparently attacking incrementally, using its older, less advanced stocks of weapons before graduating to its latest, more advanced models, so …
In his January speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave the impression of a banker turned soothsayer, a Daniel coming to judgment. Here was a born-again man of international relations who would rally the middle powers (from the middle) and try to assert influence and power in a way deemed fit for this rule-torn world.
So far, the middling powers have not gotten far. In fact, they have shown themselves despicably fawning and incapable of taking a stance on the legality of the US and Israeli strikes on Iran. Even worse, acts …
For many years, Senator Charles Schumer demanded tougher and tougher sanctions on the people of Iran, as he shamelessly documents on his own website. He insisted on a Cuba-like blockade, punishing and deterring any company or nation from providing life support to Iran. He predicted, ludicrously but proudly, that such punishing sanctions might lead to an overthrow of the Iranian government.
Like all Congressional supporters and opponents of the Obama-era nuclear deal, Schumer pretended that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons, but …
Anthropological confirmation of primitive communism
When Marx and Engels proclaimed that the first human societies practiced ”primitive communism” they hardly had much company. In the first half of the 20th century two exceptions were the archeologist V. Gordon Childe and later on the anthropologist Leslie White. It was only in the 1960s and 1970s that empirical confirmation of hunter-gatherers came forth to be seen in the works of Marshall Sahlins’ Stone Age Economics, Morton Fried’s The Evolution of Political Society and Elman Service’s Primitive Social Organization.
Releasing the Epstein Files, without holding the exposed individuals and institutions accountable, will embolden rapists and pedophiles. Transparency alone is not justice. If we don’t hold these monsters accountable, we will have allowed them to brag to all the world that they got away with rape, pedophilia, and human trafficking.
Transparency without accountability tells victims, “We hear you. We see you. But, this is normal and acceptable.” It sends the same message to perpetrators: We hear you. We see you. This is normal and acceptable.
Transparency without accountability teaches abusers that secrecy is not necessary. Impunity is already protecting them. It emboldens …
Governor of the Mykolaiv Region of Ukraine, Vitaly Kim [Source: alamy.com]
In February 2026, Zelensky’s key political ally, Mykolaiv Governor Vitaliy Kim, slammed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in an interview with British media outlet The Independent, saying that people are more important than territory. “Land is important, but people are still more important, and the situation is such that we don’t know what tomorrow will bring,” Kim said, calling on Zelensky to …
Louise Starkey, an Australian influencer in Dubai posted those words to the internet in response to Iranian missiles hitting the United Arab Emirates. The adverb says everything. Life is forever nice “here” because all the crimes we commit “there” are denied a response and whitewashed out of the news “here.”
The phrase, which Starkey erased in response to a tsunami of indignant criticism, aptly sums up the dominant attitude in the Global North, where misfortune is happenstance and the organized brutality undergirding economic life merely makes for an “interesting proposition” in an academic seminar, if …
Be it enacted, &c., That, whenever the Executive authority of any State in the Union, or of either of the Territories Northwest or South of the river Ohio, or any husband, lover or father shall demand any woman as a …
Wars can distract, and for leaders in political purgatory, they can be particularly useful. It remains to be seen whether the UK’s increasing involvement in the illegal war being waged on Iran by Israel and the United States will serve that purpose. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, the great saviour of the British Labour Party in taking them to victory in 2024, is finding himself in sinking desperation. Being less popular than a pandemic, he has much work to do if he is to retain his premiership till and after the next election.
In response to a question by a NBC reporter, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi rejected US president Donald Trump’s format of a China-United States hegemony. Instead, Wang affirmed China’s anti-hegemony and pro-multipolarity positions.
Said Wang,
[W]e should not forget there are more than 190 countries on our planet. World history has always been written by many countries together. And the future of humanity will be forged through the collective efforts of all nations.
Continuing, Wang spoke to how a world would differ from the current US hegemony with its Western conception of a rules-based order:
Britain’s role in the recent machinations of the US empire has been central, despite going underreported and little criticised. Britain has a significant hand in the ongoing US war of aggression against Iran and their recent invasion of Venezuela. Britain’s empire and overseas bases, and associated intelligence and surveillance capabilities, are cornerstones of its contribution to these ongoing wars. Just as Britain’s colonial bases in occupied Cyprus served an intelligence and surveillance role in the Gaza genocide, so to did they help surveil Iran and prepare intelligence in preparation for US attacks, and are now being used as a staging …
For centuries, humanity imagined itself as the apex of creation — the God chosen species, the master builder, the rightful ruler of the Earth. But no empire has ever been as destructive as the one we have built in our own name. We have poisoned rivers, erased forests, destabilized climates, and driven ancient species to the brink of disappearance. And still, we insist on calling this “progress.” The arrogance that once justified dominion over the Earth has now evolved into something even more dangerous: a belief that we can abandon the damage we have done and simply start again somewhere …
