Nuclear War: A Scenario Annie Jacobsen
Covering Ukraine: The Scott Ritter Interviews Through the Eyes Of Ania K Scott Ritter
Visualizing Palestine: A Chronicle of Colonialism and the Struggle for Liberation Visualizing Palestine
NATO: What You Need To Know Medea Benjamin and David Swanson
The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order Glenn Diesen
Unbecoming American: A War Memoir T.P. Wilkinson
Nicaragua: A History of US Intervention & Resistance Daniel Kovalik
Solidarity Is the Political Version of Love: Lessons from Jewish Anti-Zionist Organizing Rebecca Vilkomerson and Alissa Wise
The Magickal Enchantment of Materialism: Why Marxists Need Neopaganism Paperback Bruce Lerro
The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad
Culture and Class Conflicts 1956-1969
Field of Dreams
When I was about seven years old I used to play a “let’s pretend” baseball game in our backyard. I laid out 4 rags I’d gotten from the garage and placed them in a diamond form which represented the bases. The bases were about 20 feet apart. Then I looked at our house and took my batting stance and let my imagination take over. The imaginary scene is no doubt familiar to many of you. It is the last of the 9th inning, we are losing by three runs. …
There is little substantive difference between the Republicans and Democrats; they are both corporate dominated and controlled parties. As futile as lesser evilism is, it is also futile to talk about there being a lesser evilism between the two utterly dominant political parties in the United States.
— “Evilism: There Is No Lesser,” Dissident Voice.
Anura Kumara Dissanayake, known with convenient laziness as AKD, became Sri Lanka’s latest president after a runoff count focusing on preferential votes. The very fact that it went to a second count with a voter turnout of 77% after a failure of any candidate to secure a majority was itself historic, the first since Sri Lankan independence in 1948.
AKD’s presidential victory tickles and excites the election watchers for various reasons. He does not hail from any of the dynastic families that have treated rule and the presidential office as electoral real …
For sure since its 2023 invasion Russia has been taking a horrific amount of Ukrainian lives and causing a vast amount of injuries as most all wars do, however the constant and much longer ongoing killing and injuring during the Ukrainian civil war since the overthrow of the democratically elected Ukrainian government in 2014, has been entirely and utterly unmentioned in the hegemonic media of the West (as witnessed by this writer, who has been following this absence daily in both internet and television).
For example, although the present Ukrainian Government has been shelling Donbas since 2014, killing civilians including children. …
The paper's disinformation is making waves only now, after it printed claims based on forged Hamas documents. But the JC has been peddling falsehoods for years.
Britain’s best-known Jewish newspaper has found itself thrust into the centre of an embarrassing and long-overdue storm over its involvement with the shadowy manoeuvrings of the pro-Israel lobby.
It raises questions about the degree to which parts of the British media are – inadvertently or otherwise – colluding in Israeli disinformation.
The 180-year-old Jewish Chronicle, or JC as it is now known, lost four of its big-name columnists on Sunday, after it was revealed that the paper had published a story based on a forged document concerning Israel’s war on Gaza. Jonathan Freedland, …
Yes to Haitian Self-Determination!
The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) urges the leaders of the nations of the Americas to oppose the upcoming United Nations’ decision to renew the Multinational Security Support Mission (MSS) in Haiti for another 12 months. Additionally, we call on these regional leaders to challenge the United States’ proposal to convert this MSS into a full-fledged UN Peacekeeping mission by 2025.
On October 16, 2022, the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) sent a letter urging the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation to “respect Haitian sovereignty …
As another October approaches, the beautiful season of colors begins here in New England. Call it October’s Surprise Party. The turning leaves with all their colors come to announce the earth’s glory, the possibility of peace and happiness for all.
Yet as the month transpires and November nears, I think we might expect what for many will be the unexpected, as Bob Dylan reminds us with “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Listen: “I heard the sound of a thunder that roared out a warnin’/I heard the roar of a wave that could drown …
There are times when keeping a sense of humor would be nigh impossible.
Justin Trudeau justified the brutal killing of the leader of a Lebanese political party on the grounds Canada lists his organization as “terrorist”.
On Friday Israel leveled six large apartment buildings in the Dahiyeh suburb of Beirut with some 80 bombs weighing 2,000 to 4,000 pounds each. Dropped by US-made F-15 fighter jets, the US-made BLU-109 “bunker-busters” incinerated an unknown number.
In response to this act of state terror Trudeau posted, “Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has been killed. He was the leader of a …
On 17 March 2021, OpenSecrets.org headlined “‘Dark money’ topped $1 billion in 2020, largely boosting Democrats” and reported that,
The 2020 election saw more than $1 billion in ‘dark money’ pending at the federal level, a massive sum driven by an explosion of secret donations boosting Democrats in a historically expensive cycle. That’s according to an estimate from OpenSecrets. The billion-dollar sum includes a whopping $660 million in donations from opaque political nonprofits and shell companies to outside groups.
In many prior years, most of the dark money had been going to Republicans, but now this has apparently …
Source: Contre-Attaque, September 5, 2024
In 2017, Macron was marketed by the media as a new product. He was elected without a program, solely on the argument that he represented the “new world,” breaking away from the old political class. Seven years later, Macron is resurrecting the worst aspects of the old world, amidst increasing fascization and overt authoritarianism, having shattered the last illusions of representative democracy.
Michel Barnier: A Political Dinosaur
After a prolonged indecision over several candidates for Prime Minister, Macron ultimately chose Michel Barnier, thereby sidelining Bernard Cazeneuve and Xavier Bertrand, other contenders for the role. Michel …
Father, husband, son, brother, uncle, nephew, grandson, refugee, changling, between Viet Nam and America, writer, a voice, silenced, how many faces does it take?
Serendipity, picking Viet Thanh Nyugen’s memoir, A Man with Two Faces as the main book for the memoir writing class I am teaching. Last time it was Liar’s Club and Wild and other things to haunt the student with other writers’ haunting memoirs.
Mary Karr and Cheryl Strayed, and the students learned about all sorts of ins and outs tied to those two women’s memoirs. There is countless ink on Mary and Cheryl and endless YouTube uploads of them talking, being interviewed and giving memoir writing tips to selected and wide audiences.
Before I tackle Viet, here, some …
Officials in West Jerusalem shared a list of more than a dozen top commanders who have been killed in recent weeks….
The Illusion of a Solution
The ongoing Israeli operation against Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia group so dominant in Lebanon, is following a standard pattern. Ignore base causes. Ignore context. Target leaders, and target personnel. See matters in conventional terms of civilisational warrior against barbarian despot. Israel, the valiant and bold, fighting the forces of darkness.
The entire blood woven tapestry of the Middle East offers uncomfortable explanations. The region has seen false political boundaries sketched and pronounced by foreign powers, fictional countries proclaimed, and entities brought into being on the pure interests of powers in Europe. These empires produced shoddy cartography in the name of the …
Israel is genociding the Palestinians one neighborhood at the time, one hospital at the time, one school at the time, one refugee camp at the time, one ‘safe zone’ at the time
– Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt,
10 August 2024
One would expect that human rights organisations would spring into action during an impending or unfolding genocide – the ultimate violation of human rights. Maybe human rights NGOs actions should be proportional to the level of the crimes they are concerned with. Thus, the more killing, torture, arbitrary imprisonment, bombing…, etc., that is plainly evident, the more action one would …
Seems Germany is doing whatever it can to descend into increasing irrelevance as a state.
A video was circulated on social media showing German police chasing a boy, said to be 10-years-old, carrying a Palestinian flag during a pro-Palestinian protest in Berlin.
Activists stated that the child had been detained.
The child’s fate or whether he has been released is, at present, unconfirmed.
It was a shock to some of us progressives when Liz Cheney—once a rising, strong Republican star in the U.S. House—recently declared she was endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president, and would campaign and spend millions on it in battleground states.
As Cheney put it after a speech at Duke University: “Those of us who believe in the defense of our democracy and the defense of our Constitution and the survival of our Republic have a duty in this election cycle to come together and to put those things above politics.”
But even more mind-blowing to us (and Democratic …
Joint Statement from Veterans For Peace and Move to Amend
Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza has produced increasing calls for an immediate ceasefire, while a pro-Israel, U.S.-based group has waged an increasing war on democracy with little public scrutiny and no end in sight.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is one of the most politically and electorally influential groups in this country. They have bombarded our “democratic” system spending over $100 million just in 2024 to punish opponents of Israeli policies, including the military assault on Gaza that’s claimed over 40,000 deaths and displaced 2.3 million people.
Our democracy has always been incomplete at best, but peoples’ movements have won …
In recent days, Donald Trump and his Republican running mate, JD Vance, have doubled down on their false and defamatory claims about legally-admitted Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, thus churning up widespread fears, bomb threats, and school evacuations. Claiming that these migrants were destroying the American “way of life,” Trump promised that, if elected, he would order massive deportations. This statement echoed his astonishing promise, made during the 2024 campaign and previously, to seize and deport between 15 and 20 million immigrants.
Nativist agitation has a long, sordid history in the United States. In the 1850s, large numbers …
Adivasis facing eviction from Nagarhole Tiger Reserve protest at the park’s entrance. ©Survival
Adivasi (Indigenous) people have organized mass protests across India to denounce forced evictions from their forests to make way for tiger reserves.
Thousands of people facing eviction from their villages, and some already evicted, joined the protests last week and this week at several of the country’s most famous tiger reserves – including Nagarhole, Udanti-Sitanadi, Kaziranga, Rajaji, and Indravati. Many more protests are planned.
The director of India’s …
Don’t become addicted to power.
Here he goes again, cap in hand, begging for the alms of war. Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been touring the United States, continuing his lengthy salesmanship for Ukraine’s ongoing military efforts against Russia. The theme is familiar and constantly reiterated: the United States must continue to back Kyiv in its rearguard action for civilisation in the face of Russian barbarism. By attempting, not always convincingly, to universalise his country’s plight, Zelenskyy hopes to keep some lustre on an increasingly fading project.
The Ukrainian president has succeeded most brazenly in getting himself, and the war effort, into the innards of the US …
How a genocide got to the impossible "here" from the improbable "there"
Note: Update of my previous article from March 2008.
Except for a brief interlude during the Eisenhower administration, United States’ support for Israel, in its genocide of the Palestinian people, has been an ongoing process since the Truman administration recognized the state. Contemporary events prompt a review of the post-World War II history that resulted in the formation of a nation that had no visible name until David Ben Gurion proclaimed, on May 14, 1948, the state as Israel.
Books, articles, documents, memoirs and letters from past generations detail how a small group of insiders prevailed over recommendations from an experienced and …
When you’re 20, playing college football, chasing girls and barely keeping enough passing grades to stay out of the draft, what could be better? That was this writer in the fall of 1970, at the height of the Vietnam debacle (I never would call it a war). Just completed the greatest summer of my life (even now 54 years later) and living at home with not a damn care in the world, other than how to get more weed for the weekends. My cousin Mick and I spent June and July in beautiful (to us city boys) Virginia Beach, with …
Some people believe in a god sitting on a cloud and others believe that the Earth is a flat disk, despite the photos of Earth, the moon, Mars, and other planets belying the latter belief.
I joined the Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) in 2018 on the fiftieth anniversary of Dr King’s assassination. Rev. Dr. William Barber II, who Cornell West has described as “the closest thing we have to Dr. King,” envisioned the new PPC as a “re-consecration” of King’s life’s work to “change the coversation about what is possible in our life together.”
The first PPC dissolved after King’s assassination and I felt this rebirth, with its dynamic leadership, organizational skills, social media savvy and empathetic young membership,had the potential to evolve into a radical itransformative movement. There was a palpable sense of camaraderie at the …
Our latest visual captures the horrific testimonies of Palestinian women from Gaza who were arbitrarily detained and held incommunicado by Israel for more than 50 days, according to interviews by Amnesty International and the UN. Held hostage under the “Detention of Unlawful Combatants law,” which grants the Israeli military sweeping powers to detain anyone from Gaza without evidence, Palestinians detained from Gaza are being subjected to torture and inhumane treatment, denied access to lawyers, while their location is kept secret from their families.
Paul MacCready bicycled across the English Channel (34 km) in June 1979 on wings of carbon and Kevlar, the Gossamer Albatross
Ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seatbelts. No!
Well then, don your bicycle helmet. No! Drivers actually pay less attention to you if they see a helmet, figuring they’re not likely to kill a smarty-pants, and are less careful around you (2x as likely to pass close). A toque or baseball cap in case of rain …
Vincent van Gogh (Netherlands), The Starry Night, 1889.
In 1930, Clément Fraisse (1901–1980), a shepherd from France’s Lozère region, was confined in a nearby psychiatric hospital after he tried to burn down his parents’ farmhouse. For two years, he was held in a dark, narrow cell. Using a spoon, and later the handle of his chamber pot, Fraisse carved symmetrical images into the rough, wooden walls that surrounded him. Despite the inhumane conditions in these psychiatric hospitals, Fraisse made beautiful art in the darkness of his cell. Not far from Lozère …
Concerning opposing ideologies.
