I suppose my title could have been couched in the singular form, as Hermann Hesse, the Nobel Prize winning German/Swiss author, did with his collection of anti-war essays about World War I (the war to end all wars that didn’t), If The War Goes On . . .
Or more appropriately, I might have eliminated that conditional “If” since it seems Pollyannish.
It’s a long hard road, this anti-war business. During the first Cold War and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis in the early sixties when Kennedy and Krushchev narrowly avoided blowing the world to smithereens, Bob Dylan put it right …
It was a pitiful sight. Soaked and literally washed-out, the feeble thin British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, made an announcement that caught many in his party by surprise. On July 4, the United Kingdom will be going to the polls. Necks will find themselves in nooses and placed in the guillotine – metaphorically speaking. The stretch to slaughter has been laid out. The oddity of this drenched occasion was made all the more pungent by a protester playing, in most audible fashion, the anthem of Tony Blair’s Labour’s victory in 1997, Things Can Only Get Better.
Konstantin Kisin: An immigrant's love letter to the West, 2022
by Eric Walberg / May 30th, 2024
Konstantin Kisin emigrated to Britain in 1993 at age 11, to join the flood of Russian emigres, high and low, looking for a new life. Kisin is the usual: loves the West, hates the Soviet Union, hates Putin. Ironically, the best writing in this billet doux is Kisin’s depiction of the Soviet Union as genuinely socialist: health care, free education, economic equality. His paean to the freedom and dignity that many in the West take for granted, as reviewed by Peter Boghossian, is self parody. Kisin is also a stand-up comic, …
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant at a press conference in Tel Aviv on October 28, 2023. POOL / VIA REUTER Senator Lindsay Graham was bursting with contempt for the International Criminal Court (ICC) when he grilled Secretary of State Blinken at a May 21 Congressional hearing. Wagging his finger, he warned that, if the ICC gets away with issuing arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, “we are next.” The audience at the …
The idea that the Anglo-American Empire wages war by mistake is not new. Nor are the kinds of mistake novel. There appears to be an entire school of historical literature based on the premise that when the paragons of benevolence among the English-speaking peoples go forth to war then it is almost entirely unintentional. Apologist from down under, Christopher Clark, made a great impression with his slightly Germanophilic addition to the literature ten years ago. Belligerence is conceded occasionally, like when some functionary pronounces that the mainly brown people on the …
Professor Jeffrey Sachs is the President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He is the author of many best selling books, including The End of Poverty and The Ages of Globalization. Here he is with probably the smartest and most accurate assessment of the Ukraine war, and American foreign policy more broadly, ever caught on tape.
Several times over the past two decades, I have written about the malevolence of Israel (and by that I mean Zionist Israel, which is predominantly Jewish, although there are likeliest quislings among the Palestinian ranks, e.g., Mahmoud Abbas). Israel is part of Historical Palestine. However, the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine wrested a chunk of Historical Palestine away from Palestinians.
Since its inception, Israel, the self-declared Jewish State, has been staunchly backed by the US with the tacit support of other western nations. Israel, indeed, has a powerful lobby.
Israel has managed to chip away at the original 1947 UN …
France’s Emmanuel Macron can, at times, show himself at odds with the grime and gristle of grounded politics. Able to pack in various snatches of philosophical reflection in a speech, straddling the highs and lows of a rhetorical display, his political acumen has, at times, deserted him.
Nothing is more evident of this than his treatment of New Caledonia, a Pacific French territory annexed in 1853 and assuming the title of a non-self-governing territory in 1946. Through its tense relationship with France and the French settlers, the island territory has been beset by periodic bursts of violence and indigenous indignation. Pro-independence …
Dual Power, sometimes referred to as counter-power, is a stage in a revolutionary movement where two competing political frameworks occupy the same space. For anti-state revolutionaries this implies a significant mobilization of people organizing autonomously and outside of and against existing power structures and institutions.
In this episode of A is for Anarchy, we examine the historical origins of dual power and analyze current examples and those throughout history.
World heat is worse than ever. The entire planet is sweating.
Every summer is hot but never like this. In America, it’s a national election year in the face of global record heat. What are candidates’ positions on CO2-infused heat? Graph by Brian Brettschneider, PhD, Climatologist It’s extremely significant that global heat is just as bad in the world’s oceans, which have absorbed 85-90% of planetary heat, serving as a heat reservoir for decades. But now, the oceans are starting to strut their hot stuff. According to Copernicus, April was the 13th …
Earning enough to pay the rent or mortgage, cover utility bills and travel costs, buy food and have the occasional coffee is difficult, impossible for many.
But it’s not hard for everyone, is it? There are a small number of people living among us who don’t have to worry about the bills, are not troubled when food prices increase or rents balloon.
They are the rich and the obscenely rich. On the surface they look like the rest of us, but they live in a completely different world to the one most of us inhabit. A pristine space of privilege and political …
U.S. Memorial Day, originally intended as a solemn day of mourning for families of dead veterans has long become an opportunity for jingoistic war celebration, deceiving politicians and recruiting officers to parade and glorify warfare as a means to entrap young volunteers for future wars.
Instead of solemn mourning, on Memorial Day, war promoting corporate media, having tricked so many Americans into fighting and dying in unjust, murderous wars based on lies, now hypes our loved ones’ inglorious death as beautiful military service to entice recruits for their continuing wars.
The newly elected leader of Taiwan, Lai Ching-te, said in his May 20 inaugural speech, that all of China is one country, which is ruled by the leader of Taiwan, himself. His argument for this was that when the forces of (the Truman-backed) Chiang Kai-shek, who were beaten by the forces of Mao Tse-tung, escaped to the Japanese-occupied island of Taiwan after Japan was defeated in WW2, they set up a Government there and proclaimed it to be the Government of China and created a ‘Constitution’ for …
In 1812, need I say more, Reginald Heber composed the hymn of the Church Militant, the text of which bears citation in full:
The Son of God goes forth to war, a kingly crown to gain; his blood red banner streams afar: who follows in his train? Who best can drink his cup of woe, triumphant over pain, who patient bears his cross below, he follows in his train.
That martyr first, whose eagle eye could pierce beyond the grave; who saw his Master in the …
Israel's stooges in the West squirm as their adoration for the apartheid state turns sour
by Stuart Littlewood / May 25th, 2024
UK foreign secretery Lord David Cameron has told peers: “I don’t believe for one moment that seeking these warrants is going to help get the hostages out, it’s not going to help get aid in and it’s not going to help deliver a sustainable ceasefire. To draw moral equivalence between the Hamas leadership and the democratically-elected leader of Israel I think is just plain wrong.”
He misses the point as usual. The warrants have nothing to do with that. They are about bringing those wanted for the most grievous war crimes to justice.
On the evening of 14 May, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken climbed onstage at Barman Dictat in Kyiv, Ukraine, to pick up an electric guitar and join the Ukrainian punk band 19.99. Ukrainians, he said, are ‘fighting not just for a free Ukraine, but for a free world’. Blinken and 19.99 then played the chorus of Neil Young’s ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’, entirely ignoring the …
Throwing caution to the wind, grasping the nettle, and every little smidgen of opportunity, Australia’s opposition leader, Peter Dutton, was thrilled to make a point in the gurgling tumult of the Israel-Hamas war. Israel’s leaders, he surmised, had been hard done by the International Criminal Court’s meddlesome ways. Best for Australia, he suggested, to cut ties to the body to show its solidarity for Israel.
Dutton had taken strong issue with the announcement on May 20 by ICC prosecutor Karim A.A. Khan that requests for five arrest warrants had been sought in the context of the Israel-Hamas War. They included Hamas …
Photo Credit: Rainforest Trust “A major question is whether a large-scale collapse of the Amazon forest system could actually happen within the twenty-first century.” (Source: Bernardo M. Flores, et al, “Critical Transitions in the Amazon Forest System”, Nature, February 14, 2024).
It may seem absurd to consider collapse of the Amazon rainforest (65-million-years-old) which seems impossible, too far out, not warranting an article like this, but, sorry to say. it is already happening in early stages, as explained herein in some detail, with facts.
In fact, peer-reviewed studies of ecosystems such as …
A Review of Fire in the Straw: Notes on Inventing a Life by Nick Lyons
by Edward Curtin / May 24th, 2024
With lilacs in the dooryard blooming a week ago, I was struck by a sense of synchronicity so strong that I stood stone still and sniffed the air for its direction. I had just written a little essay about my youthful days and the first fish I caught at the age of ten and my subsequent basketball obsession. Now I was out for an early morning walk up the hill by the lake above the town across from the railroad tracks. As I dawdled in the intoxicating fragrance of the lilacs, it transported me to other springs when my blood …
Although Donald Trump, as president, proclaimed in his 2020 State of the Union address that he had produced a “blue-collar boom” in workers’ wages, the reality was quite different. Using his control of the executive branch of the U.S. government, Trump repeatedly undermined the wages of American workers by blocking raises and imposing wage reductions.
Only the preceding year, Trump derailed vital wage legislation. In July 2019―with the pathetically low federal minimum wage stuck at $7.25 per hour for a decade and some 13 million workers holding two or more jobs to support their families―the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives …
Memorial Day is a day for remembering the victims of war.
Members of Veterans For Peace remember America’s war dead not just once a year, but every day of our lives, with the solemnity they deserve, not the crass commercialism Memorial Day has become.
We remember the war dead and the far greater number of wounded with missing limbs and the even greater number living with invisible, lifelong devils and injuries in their heads.
We remember the lost contributions they could have made to society that they literally bottled up or destroyed in the epidemic of suicide rampant among veterans.
The application for arrest warrants by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim A.A. Khan in the Israel-Hamas War gives us a chance to revisit a recurring theme in the commission of crimes in international humanitarian law. Certain states, so this logic goes, either commit no crimes, or, if they do, have good reasons for doing so, be they self-defence against a monstrous enemy, or as part of a broader civilisational mission.
In this context, the application for warrants regarding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, merits particular interest. Those regarding the Hamas trio …
The merging of Zionist propaganda and anti-China hysteria should embarrass its proponents, but apparently there’s a market for this conspiratorial drivel in the “post-truth” era promoted by the far right. They want us to believe the paid foreign agents we should be concerned about are students in $40 tents calling for university divestment, not those working for a foreign-focused lobby with billions of dollars.
Last week National Post columnist John Ivison claimed the Chinese Communist Party was funding the popular uprising against Canada’s role in enabling Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Of course he supplied absolutely no evidence. The front-page article headlined “Chinese …
The Prehistory and History of Fascist Mythology Part II
by Bruce Lerro / May 22nd, 2024
Orientation
Mythology and folklore can be used for political and religious purposes whether they be to support socialism or fascism. What was going on at the end of the 19th century politically and in the 1930s that made mythology so attractive to both German and French fascists? Why did the imagined gods of the Indo-Europeans change from how they were conceived in the 19th century? Why was their geographical location changed from India to Germany? The Indo-Europeans of 19th century were considered monotheists. But in the 20th century they became polytheists or …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / May 22nd, 2024
The police state does not want citizens who know their rights.
Nor does the police state want citizens prepared to exercise those rights.
This year’s graduates are a prime example of this master class in compliance. Their time in college has been set against a backdrop of crackdowns, lockdowns and permacrises ranging from the government’s authoritarian COVID-19 tactics to its more recent militant response to campus protests.
Born in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, these young people have been raised without any expectation of privacy in a technologically-driven, mass surveillance state; educated in schools that teach conformity and compliance; saddled with a …
On May 15, we will commemorate the 76th anniversary of the Nakba amid another catastrophe. Since 1948, Palestinians have suffered a profound and enduring trauma, as families were forcibly uprooted from their ancestral lands by Zionist militias, villages were destroyed, and communities were torn apart to create the settler colonial state of Israel. The Nakba represents not only a historical event but an ongoing reality, as it laid the foundation for the continued colonization and occupation of Palestinian land and violent dispossession of the Palestinian people. This series captures how the genocide and mass displacement of Palestinians in Gaza is …
The legal world was abuzz. The diplomatic channels of various countries raged and fizzed. It had been rumoured that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, along with his cabinet colleagues, had been bracing themselves for a stinging intervention from the International Criminal Court, a body they give no credence or respect to.
Then came the words from the Prosecutor of the ICC, Karim A.A. Khan on May 20, announcing that arrest warrants were being sought in the context of the Israel-Hamas War, benignly described as the “Situation in Palestine”, under the Rome Statute. “On the basis of evidence collected and examined …
On May 15, we will commemorate the 76th anniversary of the Nakba amid another catastrophe. Since 1948, Palestinians have suffered a profound and enduring trauma, as families were forcibly uprooted from their ancestral lands by Zionist militias, villages were destroyed, and communities were torn apart to create the settler colonial state of Israel. The Nakba represents not only a historical event but an ongoing reality, as it laid the foundation for the continued colonization and occupation of Palestinian land and violent dispossession of the Palestinian people. This series captures how the genocide and mass displacement of Palestinians in Gaza …
Benjamin Netanyahu is right to dismiss as “absurd and false” the suggestion that there is any equivalence in the atrocities committed by the two sides. Here’s why
by Jonathan Cook / May 20th, 2024
There is one thing we should all be able to agree with Benjamin Netanyahu on: Any comparison between Israel’s war crimes and those of Hamas is, as the Israeli prime minister put it, “absurd and false” and a “distortion of reality”.Here’s why:
* Israeli war crimes have been ongoing for more than seven decades, long predating Hamas’ creation.
* Israel has kept the Palestinians of Gaza caged into a concentration camp for the past 17 years, denying them connection to the outside world and the essentials of life. Hamas managed to besiege …
It was faint, but there was more than just a flicker of hope. In the tormented (and tormenting) journey the WikiLeaks founder and publisher, Julian Assange, has endured, May 20, 2024 provided another pitstop. As with many such stops over the years, it involved lawyers. Many of them.
The occasion was whether the UK High Court of Justice would grant Assange leave to appeal his extradition to the United States to face 18 charges, 17 hewn from the monstrous quarry that is the Espionage Act of 1917. He is wanted for receiving and publishing classified US government materials comprising diplomatic cables, …
