World War in Syria: Global Conflict on Middle Eastern Battlefields A.B. Abrams
The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The State of Israel vs. the Jews Sylvain Cypel
Stand on Guard for Whom?: A People’s History of the Canadian Military Yves Engler
The Tragedy of American Science: From Truman to Trump Clifford D Conner
Evermore Mihaela Melnic and Scott Thomas Outlar
Manufacturing Hate: How Africa was Demonized in Western Media Milton Allimadi
No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World Michael Albert
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance Rashid Khalidi
Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present Yanis Varoufakis
It is ironic that even former right-wing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had rejected a Knesset (Israeli Parliament) bill which proposed to give the government greater power to control and suppress online content. This was in 2016, and the bill was introduced by Netanyahu’s Likud party rival, Gideon Sa’ar.
Some analysts argued that Netanyahu had feared that a law aimed at suppressing Palestinian freedom of speech online could be exploited by his enemies to control his own speech and incitement. Now that Netanyahu is no longer in the picture, the bill is back, and so is Sa’ar.
Gideon Sa’ar is currently …
@wei006119 他親口承認即使中國走上民主道路，美國也要千方百計的搞垮他。 #美國狼子野 #不願有人比美國強大 ♬ 原聲 – Sunyui Wei
The “brutalist philosophy” of the US was made public (曝光) by Robert Daly, a former US diplomat stationed in Beijing, in 2015. Currently, he is the director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States. No diplomatic niceties here, Daly frankly states the policy of the US: China must never reach the level of the US.
Paolo Urio, a professor emeritus at …
The media’s watchdog role is an illusion. The latest scandal reveals just how dependent journalists are on government
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s head is on the chopping block. Each day, the media digs up more embarrassing details of parties hosted at his No 10 residence or other government buildings, in flagrant violation of strict lockdown rules enforced on the rest of the country.
Ostensibly, the current furore creates the impression that Britain is a vigorous, functioning democracy where the media serves as a watchdog on power, holding the government to account when it breaks its word or the law, or is exposed for hypocrisy.
Prompted by the media’s revelations, Johnson is now facing …
Public and private refer to two different things. Public and private are antonyms. Public refers to everyone, the common good, non-rivalry, inclusion, broad accessibility, transparency, and more. Private means that something is not for everyone, it is not for the common good, it is exclusive. Private can also mean confidential, secret, off the record, or privileged. Neoliberals regularly blur the critical distinction between public and private for self-serving reasons.
One of the key features of privatization is that it shifts money and authority away from the public sector and into the hands of narrow private interests. In this way, privatization restricts …
Paul Fletcher, Australian Federal Minister for the Arts, in an article entitled “Festival boycott the futile work of ‘useful idiots’” (The Australian, 21/1/2022) falsely stated: “When Australians look at Israel, what they see is the only multi-party democracy in the Middle East – not an “apartheid state””.
The facts:
(1). Notwithstanding a century-long Palestinian Genocide ( 0.1 million violent deaths, over 2 million avoidable deaths from deprivation, 0.8 million expelled in 1948, 0.4 million expelled in 1967, and 8 million Exiled Palestinians today), 7.1 million disempowered Indigenous Palestinians today represent 50% of the 14.2 million subjects of Israel, and the …
Carelle Homsy (Egypt), Liberté Egypte, 2009.
For over a decade, Alaa Abd el-Fattah has been in and out of Egypt’s prisons, never free of the harassment of the military state apparatus. In 2011, during the high point of the revolution, Alaa emerged as an important voice of his generation and since then has been a steady moral compass despite his country’s attempts to suffocate his voice. On 25 January 2014, to commemorate the third anniversary of the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak’s government, Alaa and the poet …
There is no such thing as an ending. At the conclusion of any work of art, just like at the conclusion of any experience, what we arrive at is a site of interpretation. Every reader commits a creative act at that site. Every reader creates a version of their own artwork within their act of reading. No author can ever succeed at holding a singular ending in place, stable, unwavering. — Lidia Yuknavitch, Rumpus Interview
Telling one’s story is never easy. But it is the staff of life. A story, a memoir, anti-memoir, a story …
Julian Assange once said that if wars can be started by lies, they can be stopped by truth. Assange suffered immeasurably, with Britain and America taking him away for revealing facts about US war crimes in Iraq, while notorious Iraq War liar Tony Blair was knighted.
“Sir” Tony Blair may now be paraded around as a model citizen of the United Kingdom and the West, an appropriate display of the “values” our civilization now represents. Be a spreader of lies and violence like this goblin, and you will be honored. Happen upon evidence of a war crime by the state, …
Totalitarian Paranoia Run Amok
Totalitarian paranoia runs deep in American society, and it now inhabits the highest levels of government.
Once upon a time, there was a government so paranoid about its hold on power that it treated everyone and everything as a threat and a reason to expand its powers. Unfortunately, the citizens of this nation believed everything they were told by their government, and they suffered for it.
When terrorists attacked the country, and the government passed massive laws aimed at paving the way for a surveillance state, …
There has been much gnashing of ‘liberal’ teeth and pulling out of ‘centrist’ hair following the Tory government’s announcement that the BBC licence fee will be abolished in 2027.
Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries declared via Twitter, with a dash of right-wing relish:
‘This licence fee announcement will be the last. The days of the elderly being threatened with prison sentences and bailiffs knocking on doors are over. Time now to discuss and debate new ways of funding, supporting and selling great British content.’
A Guardian news piece …
History’s annals are filled with war profiteers and hustlers for the opportunistic return. They come in the form of hoarders, arms manufacturers and wily business folk making a steal on slaughter and mayhem. But the other conflict – that of battling a pandemic – has also shown that profits exist for those willing to exploit the crisis.
With the global surge of SARS-CoV-2 in 2020, there were early signs that saving money, notably for large corporations, and earning greater revenue from such a lethal crisis, was possible. Work remotely as Zoom zombies – if you can. Retreat to the second or …
It might not be quite within the bounds of good taste to compare military calculations of a bridge too far – the title used in Cornelius Ryan’s work on the disastrous Allied airborne operation during the Second World War – with the latest foolish, mendacious and buffoonish efforts of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, but on some level, the analogy works.
Throughout the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020, the Prime Minister was pressing his own assault on the pandemic fortifications developed in response to SARS-CoV-2. He had already shown himself incapable of understanding, let alone following, health directions, shaking hands with …
After over a year of incessant publicity, the Capitol building incident of January 6, 2021, has taken on mythic proportions. While all myths are prone to hyperbole, not all are entirely false as the following accounting relates.
1. January 6 was an attempted coup
According to Noam Chomsky: “That it was an attempted coup is not in question,” likening the incident to Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. However, after storming the Capitol building and taking selfies, the demonstrators simply left after a few hours. Their attempt to influence the electoral process by disruption did not and …
This isn’t going to be pretty, folks. The downfall of a death cult rarely is. There is going to be wailing and gnashing of teeth, incoherent fanatical jabbering, mass deleting of embarrassing tweets. There’s going to be a veritable tsunami of desperate rationalizing, strenuous denying, shameless blame-shifting, and other forms of ass-covering, as suddenly former Covidian Cult members make a last-minute break for the jungle before the fully-vaxxed-and-boosted “Safe and Effective Kool-Aid” servers get to them.
Yes, that’s right, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, the official Covid narrative is finally falling apart, or is being hastily disassembled, or historically revised, right …
Privately-operated charter schools are notorious for consistently under-enrolling different groups of students, even though they are ostensibly public schools that are said to be tuition-free and open to all. Few charter schools have a truly diverse student body.
Students with special needs, English language learners, and homeless students are the three main groups of regularly under-represented students in charter schools. Students who are “poor test takers” and students who have “behavior problems” are also frequently excluded from charter schools, leaving charter schools with a reputation for intensifying segregation. In Los Angeles, California, for example, privately-operated charter schools “suspended black students …
The media coverage of the hostage-taking at a synagogue in Texas has been predictably hysterical, Islamophobic and inaccurate about Aafia Siddiqui, the apparent political cause of the hostage-taker Malik Faisad Akram. According to his family in England he has “mental health issues.” He was “said to have” weapons and explosives. He was “said to have” threatened the four hostages but everyone seems to agree no one was harmed. He wanted Siddiqui free from the near-by maximum security Carswell Prison; he wanted to speak to her. Under heavy criticism the FBI has said that his hostage-taking had …
A film review of JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass by Oliver Stone
Two of the greatest speeches ever delivered by an American president bookend this extraordinary documentary film. It opens with President John F. Kennedy giving the commencement speech at American University on June 10, 1963 and it closes with his civil rights speech to the American people the following day. It is a deft artistic touch that suggests the brevity of JFK’s heroic efforts for world peace and domestic racial equality and justice before he was assassinated in a public execution in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963.
In the former …
Those Canadians who take their political cues from Israel are obsessively stoking conflict with Iran. In a clear example, former CEO of Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre Avi Benlolo has published a half dozen National Post columns critical of that country over the past year.
In a recent article headlined “As the Doomsday Clock closes in on midnight, the time for action on Iran is now,” Benlolo demanded more belligerence while in August he argued “that Iran is just two months away from a nuclear breakout” in a story headlined “Joe Biden must not support nuclear deal with Iran, …
Long before intersectionality became a prevailing concept which helped delineate the relationship between various marginalized and oppressed groups, late South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu said it all in a few words and in a most inimitable style. “My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together,” he said.
Like other freedom and justice icons, Tutu did not merely coin the kind of language that helped many around the world rise in solidarity with the oppressed people of South Africa, who fought a most inspiring and costly war against colonialism, racism and apartheid. He was a …
The US and its allies are countering the re-emergence of China with a Sinophobic confection of new alliances (the AUKUS and the Quad), military threats, jingoism and false propaganda about a falsely claimed Uyghur Genocide in Xinjiang. The UK Uyghur Tribunal admits that there have been no mass killings in Xinjiang but absurdly asserts that application of globally-praised Chinese family planning in Xinjiang is “genocide.” However excellent health, infant mortality, maternal mortality, life expectancy, population growth, per capita GDP, education, literacy and birth rate outcomes in Xinjiang and China contradict Sinophobic …
Australia’s treatment of Novak Djokovic, the tennis world number one, has been revelatory. Unintentionally, this has exposed the seedier, arbitrary and inconsistent nature of Australia’s border policies. The approval by the Australian Federal Court of the Immigration Minister Alex Hawke’s decision to re-cancel the prominent Serb’s visa left the country a heaving precedent that will be invoked, in future, with relish.
Djokovic had originally entered the country under the assumption that he had been granted a legitimate vaccine exemption. As the former Australian Tennis Open director Paul McNamee explained to the ABC, “every player and support member fills in a …
On 14 January, a breaking news story from the New York Times informed its readers: “U.S. Says Russia Sent Saboteurs Into Ukraine to Create Pretext for Invasion.”
Unsurprisingly, Washington “did not release details of the evidence it had collected.” Why did the NYT not question the withholding of evidence? Why even deign to report what so easily could be dismissed, by definition, as hearsay? Is that because the White House is a paragon of truth-telling? Did its erroneous reporting by disgraced writer Judith Miller …
The world is entering what looks like a new, even more complex cold war, in which any misunderstanding, mishap or false move could rapidly escalate into nuclear confrontation
The most pressing threat to global security right now isn’t so-called “provocations” by either Russia or China. It is the United States’ misplaced obsession with its own “credibility”.
This rallying cry by Washington officials – echoed by the media and allies in London and elsewhere – is code for allowing the US to act like a global gangster while claiming to be the world’s policeman. US “credibility” was apparently thrown into question last summer – and only when President Joe Biden held firm to a pledge to pull US troops out of Afghanistan.
Prominent critics, including in the …
He had also gone through a bad divorce, become estranged from his only daughter and been diagnosed with skin cancer, but he insisted that all of that, however painful, was secondary to the sudden realization that it was mathematics—not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon—which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant.
We can pull atoms apart, peer back at the first light and predict the end of the universe with just a handful of equations, squiggly
…
In early 2020, we saw the beginning of the COVID-19 ‘pandemic’. The world went into lockdown and even after lockdowns in various countries had been lifted, restrictions continued. Data now shows that lockdowns seemingly had limited, if any, positive impacts on the trajectory of COVID-19 and in 2022 the world – especially the poor – is paying an immense price not least in terms of loss of income, loss of livelihoods, the deterioration of mental and physical health, the eradication of civil liberties, disrupted supply chains and shortages.
The mortality rate for COVID-19 patients is linked to their comorbid conditions. In …
In this episode: China encourages peace in Africa, does business around the world, regulates care of “left-behind” children, and works toward the common prosperity goal through the construction of affordable housing.
What are the Prospects for Peace?
Events are unfolding at a quickening pace. Facing an alarming escalation in tensions around the world, we are looking to our most respected and renowned thought leaders for an honest assessment of both U.S. foreign and military policy to offer their most current thoughts and insights. We know they have some ideas for improving the prospects for peace.
Cynthia McKinney is an American politician and assistant professor at North South University, Bangladesh. As a member of the Democratic Party, she served six terms in the United States House of Representatives, as the …
Orientation
Why bother?
“Why should I care about the past? The past is over. What matters is the present and the future. Besides, the only people in the history books are usually kings, generals, or politicians. I could care less about them. What do they do? Fight wars? Attend Congress? Schmooze? History is about dead people and dead institutions. History has nothing to do with me, my family, or my friends. As for politics, I don’t vote. Why bother? They don’t represent me. Why should I care about their inaugurations, balls, and conferences? …
Anniversaries for detention centres, concentration camps and torture facilities are not the relishable calendar events in the canon of human worth. But not remembering them, when they were used, and how they continue being used, would be unpardonable amnesia.
On January 11, 2002, the first prisoners of the absurdly named “War on Terror”, declared with such confused understanding by US President George W. Bush, began arriving at the newly constructed Camp X-Ray prison at the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay. Structurally crude, it was intended as a temporary facility, remote and out of sight. Instead, it became a permanent and …
