In 2017, explosive allegations first emerged that the authorities of the Chechen Republic were reportedly interning gay men in concentration camps. After a three year period of dormancy, the accusations have resurfaced in a new feature length documentary by HBO Films entitled Welcome to Chechnya. Shot between mid-2017 and early last year, the film has received widespread acclaim among Western media and film critics. Shortly after its release last month, the Trump administration and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced an increase in economic sanctions and imposed travel restrictions against Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and his family, citing the …
Only recently, the Palestinian group, Hamas, and Israel seemed close to reaching a prisoner exchange agreement, where Hamas would release several Israeli soldiers held in Gaza while Israel would set free an unspecified number of Palestinian detainees held in Israeli prisons.
Instead of the much-anticipated announcement of some kind of a deal, on August 10, Israeli bombs began falling on the besieged Strip and incendiary balloons, originating in Gaza, made their way to the Israeli side of the fence.
If fodder is needed for the argument that a Deep State is running wild and determined to depose President Donald J. Trump, this will surely help. In a statement by self-titled “former Republican National Security Officials”, a hand-on-heart allegiance is made to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. The authors are intent on moving the incumbent out of office, “profoundly concerned about our nation’s security and standing in the world under the leadership of Donald Trump. The President has demonstrated that he is dangerously unfit to serve another term.”
These former security officials, who include former Deputy Secretary of State Richard …
What a joy to travel again!
COVID-19 is not just a disease; it is also a state of mind, a psychosis, a fear. It is an event that, all over the world, unleashed irrational behavior by the governments, individuals, and media. It triggered speculations, bizarre analyses, and selective ‘cut-and-paste science.’
Result: while there are, undeniably, few optimistic success stories, including the Russian vaccine, China’s and Vietnam’s ability to contain the pandemic without ruining the economy and livelihood of the citizens, the great majority of the world is undoubtedly in …
Video of the shooting of an unarmed Jacob Blake in the back by Kenosha Police during a domestic dispute call.
One of the most shocking things I learned talking with a Los Angeles Police Officer I became friends with while working as a reporter on my first job in L.A. was that LAPD cops were trained to “empty your revolver” whenever you fired at a person.
It’s not like in Hollywood cop movies, where you see cops in gun fights with “bad guys” and they’re trading shots with each other. What it usually involves is an officer feeling threatened, …
Like the wandering and rascally Odysseus upon whom he models his life, Oliver Stone is “double-minded” in the most profound and illuminating ways. The title of his fantastic new memoir is a case in point. “One of the first basic lessons in filming,” he writes, “is chasing the light. Without it, you have nothing – no exposure that can be seen; even what you see with your naked eye needs to be shaped and enhanced by the light.”
For as a true artist living out a marriage between his writing …
When one looks at a map of the world, Australia is prominently displayed at the southern end of the great Asian land mass. Then one looks at other statistics and one sees that Asia and China in particular is of huge economic importance to Australia. China, for example, is Australia’s largest source of foreign tourists, largest source of foreign students, and third largest source of foreign investment. This is in addition to taking more than one-third of total Australian exports, more than any other nation by a substantial margin.
Then one looks at Australia’s actual conduct in respect of its Asian …
There was very little controversial about it. A featured blog post in the Oxford Political Review, authored in April by Joshua Krook, suggested that COVID-19 had brought a host of benefits for big tech companies. Isolation ushered people towards online platforms. Engagement on such platforms had increased dramatically.
Names were not mentioned. Krook’s then employer, the Australian Public Service, made no appearance in the text. Tech entities were not outed, though Krook noted, in general, how “big tech companies” have been “pursuing the attention economy”, seeking to get “all our attention at all times.” With COVID-19, this had been achieved. …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / August 24th, 2020
Stop Voter Suppression from the Union of Concerned Scientists
Voter suppression in the 2020 election has become a topic of great concern. In reality, voter suppression has been part of US politics since the founding of the country. The oligarchs who wrote the US Constitution enabled voter suppression by not including the right to vote in it and only allowing white male property owners to vote, suppressing the votes of 94 percent of the population.
Maj. Gen. Andrew Croft, the commander of 12th Air Force, wrote on 22 August: “I have seen an increasingly contested strategic space where Beijing and Moscow are aggressively investing time and resources in Latin America to support their authoritarian models of governance. The Air Force must reinforce the strength of our longstanding commitment to the Western Hemisphere. We lose ground when we are unable to commit to spending the time and resources to fly our aircraft south and train alongside our partners.”
Croft’s statement reflects the growing American hysteria against the presence of any extra-regional actors in the Latin American …
Palestinians are not going anywhere. This is the gist of seven decades of Palestinian struggle against Zionist colonialism. The proof? The story of Ahmed Amarneh.
Amarneh, a 30-year-old civil engineer from the northern West Bank village of Farasin, lives with his family in a cave. For many years, the Amarneh family has attempted to build a proper home, but their request has been denied by the Israeli military every time.
In many ways, the struggle of the Amarnehs is a microcosm of the collective struggle of Farasin; in fact, of most Palestinians.
Those who are unfortunate enough to be living in areas …
Starting around 1848, socialists flooded the world with pamphlets and manifestos explaining the basics of “wage-labor” vs. “capital.” Yet here we are in the 21st century, having to go back to basics — even though one would think that the dire economic situation for most people today “speaks for itself.” However, given the recent misguided detour into side-issues — notably, police-style racism vs. “anti-fascism” (whatever happened to “anti-globalization”?) — a basic reminder about the primacy of “class” seems to be in order.
With the collapse of the Soviet bloc, beginning over 30 years ago, socialism was peremptorily consigned to …
On August 2, lockdown measures were implemented in Melbourne, Australia, that were so draconian that Australian news commentator Alan Jones said on Sky News: “People are entitled to think there is an ‘agenda to destroy western society.’”
The gist of an August 13th article on the Melbourne lockdown is captured in the title: “Australian Police Go FULL NAZI, Smashing in Windows of Civilian Cars Just Because Passengers Wouldn’t Give Details About Where They Were Going.”
Another article with an arresting title was by Guy Burchell in the August 7th Australian National Review: “Melbourne Cops May Now …
Limitation is essential to authority. A government is legitimate only if it is effectively limited.
— Lord Acton,
It is a study both troublesome and perplexing. To what end can a state trample on human rights ostensibly to preserve such objects a public health? The coronavirus lockdowns have become a feature of global politics and relentless mandatory intrusion, the health department made sovereign, assisted by vigorous policing. States have used, and continue to use, all manner of measures to confine individuals to homes, mask them, restrict movement, while, in some cases, shutting them up as dissenters and hurrying them into obscurity. The …
With a representative like this Palestinians might be better off with no envoy in Canada. A recent profile of the Palestinian Authority’s agent in Ottawa confirms the PA is more a colonial tool than a voice for an oppressed people.
In the Hill Timesinterview Hala Abou-Hassira refuses to answer whether Canada’s anti-Palestinian voting record at the UN had harmed its bid for a seat on the Security Council. Abou-Hassira responded by saying she didn’t know how different member states voted but hoped Canada would win a seat in the future. She even refused to criticize the Canadian government for …
Winston Churchill, in the British House of Commons on November 11, 1947, made the following statement:
Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…”
Churchill did not originate these famous words but was quoting an unknown predecessor. ((“Churchill By Himself: The Definitive Collection of Quotations,” by Richard Langworth, Editor, (Public Affairs, May 24, 2011), p. …
…a permanent modern scenario: apocalypse looms … and it doesn’t occur.
— Susan Sontag, AIDs and its Metaphors, 1989
I should not misuse this opportunity to give you a lecture about, say, logic. I call this a misuse, for to explain a scientific matter to you it would need a course of lectures and not an hour’s paper. Another alternative would have been to give you what’s called a popular scientific lecture, that is a lecture intended to make you believe that you understand a thing which actually you don’t understand, and to gratify what I believe to be one of the …
by Ramzy Baroud and Romana Rubeo / August 21st, 2020
The notion that ‘Canada is better’, especially when compared with US foreign policy, has persisted for many years. Recent events at the United Nations have, however, exposed the true nature of Canada’s global position, particularly in the matter of its blind and unconditional support for Israel.
On June 17, Canada lost its second bid for the coveted UN Security Council seat, which, had it won, would have allowed Ottawa the opportunity to become a world leader, pushing its own agenda — and those of its allies — on the global stage.
However, this, too, was a wasted opportunity. Only 108 countries voted …
When the Palestinian actor Mohammed Bakri made a documentary about Jenin in 2002 – filming immediately after the Israeli army had completed rampaging through the West Bank city, leaving death and destruction in its wake – he chose an unusual narrator for the opening scene: a mute Palestinian youth.
Jenin had been sealed off from the world for nearly three weeks as the Israeli army razed the neighbouring refugee camp and terrorised its population.
Bakri’s film Jenin, Jenin shows the young man hurrying silently between wrecked buildings, using his nervous body to illustrate where Israeli soldiers shot Palestinians and where bulldozers collapsed …
One story of surviving as an artist in the USA, from the collapse of the music industry to the housing crisis to the pandemic.
Occasionally, for one reason or another, I feel inspired to write an essay about my personal finances, mainly because, for me, it’s an interesting perspective, the really up-close and nitty gritty one. But also these days, the plight of artists is often in the news, along with the plights of many other people, and I have been regularly getting …
Scandalous underpayment has become common fare at Australia’s universities. An inverse relationship can be identified here: the wealthier the institution, the more likely it will short change staff and avoid coughing up the cash. If anything is coughed up, it will be meagrely rationed. We are not all in this together.
The casualization of the Australian university workforce is a process that has chugged along for three decades or so. Doing so alleviates the need to pay an ongoing workforce in conditions that are less secure in terms of employment but more beneficial to the institution’s management line. There is no …
A high-profile and highly influential scientific study regarding the potential of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) to treat Covid-19 patients was retracted among suggestions of fraud back in June. The research in question was headed by a renowned Harvard professor called Mandeep Mehra and published by The Lancet, the most prestigious medical journal in the world.
It concluded that the antimalarial drug used since the 1950´s was actually killing Covid-19 patients by inducing heart failures. It caused quite a stir. (Brief historical fact: the Quina tree, the source of quinine and its family of medications, is also the “national …
Any conditions that compel the teacher to take note of failures rather than of healthy growth give false standards and result in distortion and perversion.
— John Dewey, ((John Dewey, Moral Principles in Education (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1909): 189.))
You should never judge a book by its title, but with whistleblower Edward Snowden’s Permanent Record the reader gets as close s/he can possibly get to the soul of a narrative before actually reading it. He means it: The American government, with help of its data-gathering 5 Eyes partners, is gathering up information on every mobile or Internet-connected individual on the planet. They have a permanent dossier on each and every one of us. Snowden writes, “We are the first people in the history …
Workers are the bedrock of every nation on earth. Even autocratic and fascist societies and those that repress workers depend upon them nevertheless. The nature of work may change with technology, and the dichotomy between worker and management may blur, especially in societies where the workers hold greater power, but the …
Don’t bother, they’re here, already performing in the center ring under the big top owned and operated by The Umbrella People.
Trump, Biden, Pence, Harris, and their clownish sidekicks, Pompeo, Michelle Obama, et al., are performing daily under the umbrella’s shadowy protection. For The Umbrella People run a three-ring circus, and although their clowns pop out of separate tiny cars and, acting like enemies, squirt each other with water hoses to the audience’s delight, raucous laughter, and serious attentiveness, they are all part of the same show, working for the same bosses. Sadly, many people think this circus is the real …
A review of Diana Johnstone's book Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher
by Rick Sterling / August 19th, 2020
Diana Johnstone has written a compelling and insightful book. It is mostly a review and analysis of significant events from the past 55 years. It concludes with her assessment of different trends that are being debated on the Left today including “identity politics,” Antifa and censorship. This is a book to be read, enjoyed and discussed.
Circle in the Darkness gives glimpses into Johnstone’s personal life. She was born in St. Paul, Minnesota and grew up there and in Washington DC. She studied and taught at …
French President, Emmanuel Macron, is in no position to pontificate to Lebanon about the need for political and economic reforms. Just as thousands of Lebanese took to the streets of Beirut demanding “revenge” against the ruling classes, the French people have relentlessly been doing the same; both peoples have been met with police violence and arrests.
Following the August 4 blast which killed over 200 people and wounded thousands more, the irony was inescapable when Macron showed up in a bizarre display of “solidarity” on the streets of Beirut. Macron should have taken his roadshow to the streets …
When people say “America” everyone understands they mean one country, the USA. In a similar fashion it is time for all to understand that the Organization of American States (OAS) serves the interests of that country.
In a recent webinar on “Bolivia’s fight to restore democracy and Canada’s role” organized by the Canadian Latin America Alliance and Canadian Foreign Policy Institute, Matthew Green forthrightly criticized Canadian policy in that country and the hemisphere. The NDP MP said “Canada is complicit in the attack on indigeneity in Bolivia” and that “we are an imperialist, extractivist country.” He added that …
Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.
? Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
And so it begins again, the never-ending, semi-delusional, train-wreck of an election cycle in which the American people allow themselves to get worked up into a frenzy over the misguided belief that the future of this nation—nay, our very lives—depends on who we elect as president.
