Latest articles
Book Review of The Revolutionary Ecological Legacy of Herbert Marcuse by Charles Reitz
by Robert Hunziker / April 19th, 2024
World events serve as a stage of constant search for how best to construct and maintain society, which is an underlying theme of some decades ago found in the works of Herbert Marcuse, 1898–1979, German-American philosopher of prominent fame during the 1960s considered an intellectual giant of his time.
Charles Reitz, widely recognized as a scholar of Herbert Marcuse, has brought to life his ideology for a prosperous healthy society, proposing that “nature is an ally” in his book The Revolutionary Ecological Legacy of Herbert Marcuse, 284 pgs. Daraja Press, 2023.
Today, it can be argued that a byzantine world of …
by Binoy Kampmark / April 18th, 2024
The skin toasted Australian Minister of Defence, Richard Marles, who resembles, with each day, the product of an overly worked solarium, was adamant. Not only will Australians be paying a bill up to and above A$368 billion for nuclear powered submarines it does not need; it will also be throwing A$100 billion into the coffers of the military industrial complex over the next decade to combat a needlessly inflated enemy. Forget diplomacy and funding the cause (and course) of peace – it’s all about the weapons and the Yellow Peril, baby.
On April 18, Marles and Defence Industry Pat Conroy …
by Edward Curtin / April 18th, 2024
Like all living creatures, people need to eat to live. Some people, eaten from within by a demonic force, try to deny others this basic sustenance. All across the world people are starving because the powerful and wealthy create economic and political conditions that allow their wealth to be built on the backs of the world’s poor. It is an old story, constantly updated. It is one form of official terrorism.
From the Irish famine with its terrible aftermath created by the imperialist British government in the nineteenth century that caused the death of between one and two million Irish and …
by Paul Larudee / April 18th, 2024
My wife is currently cancer free, but her chemotherapy caused her to gain a lot of weight, which she wants to lose. She says that she doesn’t have the will and self-discipline to change her diet or start an exercise routine. Instead, she seeks cures and promises from advertisers on social media for expensive fake remedies in a bottle. Of course, these never work as advertised. I warn her that, “If it sounds too good to be true, it is.”
Such is the two-state solution. It has been a fake and a fantasy …
Down with Big Brother
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / April 18th, 2024
Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference … The Thought Police would get him just the same … the arrests invariably happened at night … In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.
— George Orwell, 1984
The government long ago sold us …
by Roger D. Harris / April 17th, 2024
The North American peace movement is contesting ongoing US wars in Ukraine and Palestine and preparations for war with China. Out of the fog of these wars, a clear anti-imperialist focus is emerging. Giving peace a chance has never been more plainly understood as opposition to what Martin Luther King, Jr., referred to as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world: my own government.”
Palestinian, Muslim and Arab, and anti-Zionist Jewish groups have been in the forefront of the anti-imperialist peace movement. With strong youth components, they are not confused by either relying on sell-out liberal Democrats (e.g., anti-Iraq War) …
by Graham Peebles / April 17th, 2024
Award Winning Documentary Film by Graham Peebles
Ignored by western governments and largely overlooked by media a genocide is taking place in Ethiopia. The Amhara people, a large ethnic group, are being ethnically cleansed from the region of Oromia, the largest region in the country.
Tens of thousands of Amhara have been killed by Oromo fanatics (estimates range from 30,000 – 50,000); over three million have been displaced, homes, land and livestock stolen.
The Oromo Liberation Front (OLF or Shene) together with the Oromo regional militia are responsible for the carnage, with the support of the Oromo Regional Authority and the federal government.
In …
The U.S. regime’s aggressive intent against China is now undeniable
by Eric Zuesse / April 17th, 2024
by Yves Engler / April 17th, 2024
A rich, exclusionary municipality is claiming persecution because Parliament passed a motion to lessen Canada’s role in a genocide. Hampstead highlights the moral abyss of large swaths of Canada’s Jewish community.
Last Monday the Montreal area municipality unanimously passed a motion demanding “the Council of Hampstead, hereby expresses its non-confidence in the Government of Canada for its distancing from the longstanding policy of support for Israel, which has resulted in a major spike in antisemitism across Canada; THAT the Town council calls upon the Government of Canada to reaffirm its commitment to supporting Israel and to take concrete actions to combat …
The Middle East is on the brink of war precisely because western politicians indulged for decades every military excess by Israel
by Jonathan Cook / April 17th, 2024
Suddenly, western politicians from US President Joe Biden to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak have become ardent champions of “restraint” – in a very last-minute scramble to avoid regional conflagration.
Iran launched a salvo of drones and missiles at Israel at the weekend in what amounted a largely symbolic show of strength. Many appear to have been shot down, either by Israel’s layers of US-funded interception systems or by US, British and Jordanian fighter jets. No one was killed.
It was the first direct attack by a state on Israel since Iraq fired …
by Binoy Kampmark / April 17th, 2024
Only this month, the near comatose US President, Joe Biden, made a casual, castaway remark that his administration was “considering” the request by Australia that the case against Julian Assange be concluded. The WikiLeaks founder has already spent five gruelling years in London’s Belmarsh prison, where he continues a remarkable, if draining campaign against the US extradition request on 18 charges, 17 incongruously and outrageously based on the US Espionage Act of 1917.
Like readings of coffee grinds, his defenders took the remark as a sign of progress. Jennifer Robinson, a longtime member of Assange’s legal team, told Sky News …
by John Perry / April 17th, 2024
Last Thursday, Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, the British-Palestinian war surgeon, gave his first address as the newly-appointed rector of Glasgow University, chosen in recognition of his work at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza. The following day he flew to Berlin, where he had been invited to address a major conference about Palestine. On arrival he was taken away by police, interrogated for several hours and eventually told he had to leave Germany and wouldn’t be allowed to return until at least the end of April. Any attempt to speak to the conference via Zoom could result in a fine or even …
by E.R. Bills / April 16th, 2024
My wife’s dad is from Grenada, and we visited there last October. It was an incredible place and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, but, when I was speaking with one of my father-in-law’s relatives, I unknowingly committed a geo-political faux pas.
It had been a while since I had traveled to a less commercialized destination and, unaware that the relevant categorizations had changed, I said something about being proud of myself because I thought I had gotten too soft to travel in a Third World country. A group of us stayed in a modest seaside villa. The air conditioning was iffy. The …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / April 16th, 2024
The bodies of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes are buried in a mass grave in Khan Younis.
Photo credit: Al-Jazeera
The Israeli online magazine +972 has published a detailed report on Israel’s use of an artificial intelligence (AI) system called “Lavender” to target thousands of Palestinian men in its bombing campaign in Gaza. When Israel attacked Gaza after October 7, the Lavender system had a database of 37,000 Palestinian men with suspected links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
Lavender assigns a numerical score, from one to a hundred, …
by C.J. Hopkins / April 16th, 2024
Thank God for the German Hate Police! Or heil … or whatever the appropriate salutation is for these unsung heroes. They just saved us all from “hate” again!
Yes, that’s right, once again, democracy-loving people here in New Normal Berlin and all across the New Normal world were right on the brink of being exposed to “hate,” and would have been exposed to “hate,” had the Hate Police not sprang into action.
You probably have no idea what I’m talking about.
OK, what happened was, some pro-Palestinian activists organized a “Palestine Congress,” and attempted …
by Binoy Kampmark / April 15th, 2024
The Middle East has, for some time, been a powder keg where degrees of violence are tolerated with ceremonial mania and a calculus of restraint. Assassinations can take place at a moment’s notice. Revenge killings follow with dashing speed. Suicide bombings of immolating power are carried out. Drone strikes of devastating, collective punishment are ordered, all padded by the retarded notion that such killings are morally justified and confined.
In all this viciousness, the conventional armed forces have been held in check, the arsenals contained, the generals busied by plans of contingency rather than reality. The rhetoric may be vengeful and …
by Rick Sterling / April 15th, 2024
The photo is a screen shot from Press TV showing a demo protest against the shutdown of the conference.
A three day Palestine conference in Berlin was forcibly shut down after three hours on Friday. Electricity was abruptly terminated in the midst of the presentation by Salman Abu Sitta, the 87 year old author of the authoritative “Atlas of Palestine”.
Former Greek Finance Minister and leader of DIEM25, Yanis Varoufakis, was prevented from entering Germany to attend the conference. He went on Twitter/X to send a message:
Do you know that …
by Ted Glick and Jane Califf / April 15th, 2024
“We are a married couple of 45 years. We are taking action together as elders deeply concerned about the future facing our 3-year-old grandson, all children, and all life on earth. That is why we have joined with many others to stop the destructive and abusive Mountain Valley Pipeline, as well as any new fossil fuel infrastructure. Three years ago, the International Energy Agency said that was needed even then, because of the seriousness of the climate emergency
“We need solar and wind right now, not destructive fossil fuels and a trillion dollar a year war economy.
“We are outraged that billions …
by Robert Hunziker / April 15th, 2024
The Paris climate agreement of 2015 set the standards for how nation/states must approach the net zero target year 2050 by reducing greenhouse gas emissions in stages, starting with major reductions by 2030.
Paris ’15 is dead.
According to a new report by Global Energy Monitor of San Francisco, at least 20B barrels of oil equivalent has been discovered since the International Energy Agency statement of fact in 2021 that no new oil, gas, or coal development should proceed if the world is to reach net zero by 2050.
Nevertheless, as of today, fossil fuel producers worldwide plan on quadrupling output from …
by Visualizing Palestine / April 15th, 2024
Spending priorities of the US Congress
by Visualizing Palestine / April 13th, 2024
What would happen if the US Congress funded solar energy instead of war on Palestine?
The Islamic Republic has sent multiple drones toward the Jewish State, according to media reports
by RT / April 13th, 2024
And resume their hill-top viewing of the carnage in Gaza
by Stuart Littlewood / April 13th, 2024
by William Manson / April 13th, 2024
In his book Totem and Taboo, Sigmund Freud indulged in a speculative scenario for the origins of society. Everyone, young and old alike, once lived together in a “primal horde”– ruled by an aging, domineering father-figure, who selfishly monopolized the women for his own satisfaction. But one day (so to speak), the deprived “sons” defiantly rose up, challenged his control–and slew him. In the aftermath, separate nuclear families now became possible, along with the sanctions and taboos which would facilitate orderly social relations.
Notwithstanding the fanciful quality of Freud’s origin-myth, world mythology …
by Ruwaida Amer / April 13th, 2024
Al-Aqsa University in Khan Younis is one of many areas in Khan Younis to which Israel has caused enormous damage. (Ruwaida Amer)
Khaled Arqoub was shocked when he saw that his home had been flattened.
It and the buildings next door were destroyed after Israeli troops entered Khan Younis city in tanks.
“I have lost everything,” Arquob said.
When Israel began its ground invasion, Arquob left his home for al-Mawasi, an area in southern Gaza. He only came back to Khan Younis after the Israeli forces withdrew a few days ago.
“As I walked …
by Binoy Kampmark / April 13th, 2024
While the Australian government continues to pirouette with shallow constancy on the issue of Israel’s war in Gaza, making vacuous utterances on Palestinian statehood even as it denies supplying the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) with weapons (spare parts, it would seem, are a different, footnoted matter), efforts made to unearth details of the defence relationship between the countries have so far come to naught.
The brief on Australian-Israel relations published by the Department of Trade and Foreign Affairs is deplorably skimpy, noting that both countries have, since 2017, “expanded cooperation on national security, defence and cyber security.” Since 2018, we …
by Eric Zuesse / April 12th, 2024
A Washington Post columnist, Catherine Rampell, headlined on April 5, “The Great Medicaid Purge was even worse than expected” and reported:
It’s a tale of two countries: In some states, public officials are trying to make government work for their constituents. In others, they aren’t.
This week marks one year since the Great Medicaid Purge (a.k.a. the “unwinding”) began. Early during the pandemic, in exchange for additional funds, Congress temporarily prohibited states from kicking anyone off Medicaid. But as of April 1, 2023, states were allowed to start disenrolling people.
Some did so immediately. So …
by Robert Hunziker / April 12th, 2024
When America’s leading authority on the climate system Gavin Schmidt of NASA throws his hands up in the air, exclaiming, we’ve got a knowledge gap for the first time since satellites started tuning into the planet’s climate system, what does this imply about future conditions for the planet?
Gavin Schmidt, Director, Goddard Institute for Space Studies: “In general, the 2023 temperature anomaly has come out of the blue, revealing an unprecedented knowledge gap perhaps for the first time since about 40 years ago, when satellite data began offering modellers an unparalleled, real-time view of Earth’s climate system.” (Gavin Schmidt,”Climate Models Can’t …
by Binoy Kampmark / April 11th, 2024
Walking stiffly, largely distracted, and struggling to focus on the bare essentials, US President Joe Biden was keeping company with his Japanese counterpart, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, when asked the question. It concerned what he was doing regarding Australia’s request that the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange be returned to Australia.
Assange, who has spent five tormenting years in Belmarsh Prison in London, is battling extradition to the US on 18 charges, 17 tenuously and dangerously based on the US Espionage Act of 1917.
The words that followed from the near mummified defender of the Free World were short, yet bright enough for …
by Visualizing Palestine / April 11th, 2024
prioritize 1,700,000 public housing units for the US instead of killing Palestinians