Latest articles
by Cathy Breen / March 31st, 2018
Naomi Shihab Nye is a poet and professor of Creative Writing at Texas State. Her father was Palestinian and a refugee journalist. In one of her poems after 9/11, entitled “Blood,” she writes:
I call my father, we talk around the news.
It is too much for him,
neither of his two languages can reach it.
I drive into the country to find sheep, cows,
to plead with the air:
Who calls anyone civilized?
Where can the crying heart graze?
What does a true Arab do now?
I myself tried to write something for the 15 year “commemoration” of the US war against Iraq, but wasn’t able to complete …
by Jonathan Cook / March 31st, 2018
Here is a good example of pure, unadulterated western propaganda from the Guardian, written by one of their most senior journalists, Julian Borger. This could be straight out of of the old Soviet mouth-piece Pravda.
According to the Guardian:
China and Russia are leading a stealthy and increasingly successful effort at the United Nations to weaken UN efforts to protect human rights around the world, according to diplomats and activists.
The article continues in similar vein, blaming the two official enemies of the west for the increasingly degraded status of human rights at the UN.
As far I can tell, none …
by Binoy Kampmark / March 31st, 2018
Fake news has not merely become a business but a designation. It is a way of silencing dissent, and questioning accounts. For the authoritarian, this is not merely a delight, but a necessity. News accounts are deemed the stuff and dreams of the inventive, and those inventors deserve punishment.
Denial becomes a state of mind, and a very convinced one at that. President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an of Turkey can say with confidence that the casualties of any military action against the Kurds have been exaggerated. US accounts of the bloody surge in Afrin in February made him seethe. “You don’t …
by John Andrews / March 31st, 2018
Dear Mr Yakovenko,
I would just like to express my sincere dismay at the way my government reacted to the alleged recent poisoning of two people in Salisbury.
I recall very well the events that occurred fifteen years ago, when the British parliament was lied to about alleged weapons of mass destruction, supposedly held by Iraq, and which supposedly could strike at Britain within forty minutes. These allegations went almost completely unchallenged by the mainstream media, and our country was subsequently tricked into supporting an illegal war in Iraq. Although many people never believed the propaganda – as evidenced by the …
by Peter Koenig / March 30th, 2018
By now the West – the US, Canada, Australia and the super-puppets of Europe, overall more than 25 countries – has expelled more than 130 Russian diplomats. All as punishment for Russia’s alleged nerve gas poisoning of a former Russian/MI6 double-agent, Sergei Skripal (66) and his daughter Yulia (33), who was visiting her father from Moscow. Sergei Skripal lived in the UK for the last seven years, ever since President Putin lifted his prison sentence in 2010 in a spy swap with the UK. The pair, father and daughter, was allegedly discovered on 4 March slumped on a park bench …
by John W. Whitehead / March 30th, 2018
“In that dramatic scene on Calvary’s hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime — the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps …the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.”
— Martin Luther King Jr.
Just as police states have arisen throughout history, there have also been individuals or groups of individuals who have risen up to challenge the injustices …
by Edward Curtin / March 30th, 2018
The existent, the body, disappears. We live within a spectacle of empty clothes and unworn masks….Nobodies and no Necessity – for Necessity is the condition of the existent. It is what makes reality real.
— John Berger, “Steps Toward a Small Theory of the Visible”.
The real body. To be real, it must be bodily; and to be a body is to be eaten. The humiliation in incarnation; to become bread. To be eaten: to be consumed by sorrow, sickness, and death.
— Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body, 1966, Re-issued by University of California Press, September 1990.
If Marx were functioning today he would …
by Gary Olson / March 30th, 2018
In yesterday’s New York Times, regular op-ed contributor David Brooks heaped effusive praise on last Saturday’s March for Our Lives. Brooks wrote:
I have to say, I loved the gun-control march I observed last Saturday in Washington. The crowd was good-hearted, gracious, diverse and welcoming… Everybody kept underlining their faith in our democratic system, that voting is the way to make change…Of course some of the student speakers were grandiose and pretentious. Most of us were like that when we were 18.
Brooks is sometimes described as ‘the liberals’ favorite conservative,” perhaps because of his erudition and seeming reasonableness. In truth, Brooks …
by Norman Ball / March 30th, 2018
Schiff Is a Shill for the Russians
— Mark Levin
Lamenting Germany’s WW1 defeat at the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, Joseph Goebbels acknowledges a hard lesson learned:
While the enemy states produced unprecedented atrocity propaganda aimed at Germany throughout the whole world, we did nothing and were completely defenseless against it…Just as we were militarily and economically unprepared for the war, so also with propaganda. We lost the war in this area more than in any other. The cleverest trick used in propaganda against Germany during the war was to accuse Germany of …
by Andrey Fomine / March 29th, 2018
The UK government’s presentation on the Salisbury incident, which was repeatedly cited in recent days as an “ultimate proof” of Russia’s involvement into Skripal’s assassination attempt, was made public earlier today.
This 6-paged PDF is a powerful evidence of another intellectual low of the British propaganda machine. Open it and you can tell that substantially it makes only two assertions on the Skripal case, and both are false:
First. Novichok is a group of agents developed only by Russia and not declared …
Israeli town freezes new housing project to stop entry of Palestinian citizens. But the mayor insists he’s not racist
by Jonathan Cook / March 29th, 2018
How would you describe a white town in a southern state in the United States that froze the tender for plots of land in a new neighbourhood because it risked allowing blacks to move in? As racist?
What would you think of the town’s mayor for claiming the decision was taken in the interests of preserving the “white character” of his community? That he was a bigot?
And how would you characterise the policy of the state in which this town was located if it enforced almost complete segregation between whites and blacks, ghettoising the black population? As apartheid, or maybe Jim …
by Binoy Kampmark / March 29th, 2018
How gloriously brave it seemed, some 23 nations coming together like a zombie collective to initiate a fairly ineffectual action in of itself: the expulsion of Russian diplomats or, as they preferred to term it, intelligence operatives.
It all began in celebratory fashion in Britain, when Prime Minister Theresa May decided to push the issue with the expulsion of 23 in the wake of the poisonings of Sergei Skripal, his daughter Yulia, and Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey. Russia, in a reciprocal effort, retorted in kind.
Since then, the number of states similarly inclined to reduce Russia’s diplomatic set has grown.
This is a …
by Herb Dyer / March 29th, 2018
Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are enriched beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That’s the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change, we are going to have to change the system.
— Martin Luther King, Jr., 1967
The murder of Dr. King on April 4, 1968, marked a sea change in black America’s long, tortuous sojourn in this nation-state. Of course, assassination of black leaders and sympathizers has been a mainstay of American life from …
...but should go further
by Yves Engler / March 29th, 2018
Do you support humanity and livability? Or the “right” of people to use private cars?
This question is aimed particularly at the left end of the political spectrum, to that part of the public who should know better.
It’s been dispiriting to see progressives echo a right wing municipal party/dominant media campaign against curtailing car traffic through Montréal’s mountain park. Anyone concerned with humanity’s fate should avoid amplifying the reactionary backlash to a move that would mitigate Québec and Canada blowing past unambitious carbon targets for 2020 and probably 2030.
Recently Montréal’s new city government announced a five-month pilot project that …
by Binoy Kampmark / March 29th, 2018
Being a netizen, to use that popular term of sociological derivation, can be a difficult business. It presumes digital engagement, often of the sharper sort. To become a fully-fledged member of such citizenry, however, presumes access, a degree of Internet speed and appropriate platforms. Absent those, then different forms of activism must be sought.
Governments and authorities the world over have come to appreciate that either the activity itself is controlled (limiting internet access, for one), or the content made available on the Internet (the Great Firewall of China). The resonant cliché there is that the one who controls the …
by Kevin Zeese / March 29th, 2018
Roxbury climate necessity defendants. (By Peter Bowden)
Massachusetts – On March 27, 13 defendants went into the West Roxbury District courthouse to answer charges related to their arrests protesting the West Roxbury Massachusetts Lateral Pipeline. They expected to have charges against them reduced to civil infractions — the equivalent of a parking ticket. While finding no grounds to deny that motion from the prosecution, the judge chose to let each defendant testify briefly on the necessity of their actions.
The defendants collectively presented a powerful and comprehensive argument for …
by Ajamu Baraka / March 28th, 2018
They called in [Roy] Wilkins; they called in [A. Philip] Randolph; they called in these national Negro leaders that you respect and told them, ‘Call it off.’ Kennedy said, ‘Look, you all are letting this thing go too far.’ And Old Tom said, ‘Boss, I can’t stop it, because I didn’t start it.’… And that old shrewd fox, he said, ‘If you all aren’t in it, I’ll put you in it. I’ll put you at the head of it.’…
— Malcolm X on the 1963 “Farce on Washington”)
Liberals and Democrat party connected organizations and networks have been quite adept at getting …
by Ramzy Baroud / March 28th, 2018
The ‘deal of the century’ is a farce. We suspected that, of course, but, upon his return from Washington, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, revealed in more detail why the long-anticipated plan of the administration of US President Donald Trump has no basis in reality.
Netanyahu told his cabinet that there are “no concrete details” to report on the US peace plan. One has to suspect that the ‘plan’ was, all along, the US disavowal of the so-called peace process and the dropping of the ‘honest peace broker’ act.
In fact, that much has been achieved, especially with the US decision …
by John W. Whitehead / March 28th, 2018
It is often the case that police shootings, incidents where law enforcement officers pull the trigger on civilians, are left out of the conversation on gun violence. But a police officer shooting a civilian counts as gun violence. Every time an officer uses a gun against an innocent or an unarmed person contributes to the culture of gun violence in this country.
— Celisa Calacal, Journalist
Enough is enough.
That was the refrain chanted over and over by the thousands of demonstrators who gathered to protest gun violence in America.
Enough is enough.
We need to do something about the violence that is …
by Paul de Rooij / March 28th, 2018
One must marvel at the first few paragraphs of Amnesty International’s recent press release:
The international community’s catastrophic failure to take concrete action to protect the people of Syria has allowed parties to the conflict, most notably the Syrian government, to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity with complete impunity, often with assistance of outside powers, particularly Russia. Every year we think it is just not possible for parties to the conflict to inflict more suffering on civilians, and yet, every year, they prove us wrong…
Right now, in Eastern Ghouta 400,000 men, women and children, who have been living under …
Simple lessons in ocean acidification, shifting demographics, embedded pain
by Paul Haeder / March 28th, 2018
You ever wonder what a Martian might think if he happened to land near an emergency room? He’d see an ambulance whizzing in and everybody running out to meet it, tearing the doors open, grabbing up the stretcher, scurrying along with it. ‘Why,’ he’d say, ‘what a helpful planet, what kind and helpful creatures.’ He’d never guess we’re not always that way; that we had to, oh, put aside our natural selves to do it. ‘What a helpful race of beings,’ a Martian would say. Don’t you think so?
? Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist, April 2002
Respite. Oregon Coast. Tidepools, grey …
by Gary Leupp / March 27th, 2018
Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned by a nerve agent on March 4 on a park bench in Salisbury, England.
Skripal had been a Russian double agent, a spy who turned over 300 names of Russian spies to British intelligence from 1995 to 2004. He was (not so surprisingly) arrested in Russia in 2004 and sentenced to thirteen years in prison. He was released in a spy-swap in 2010, settled in the UK and became a British citizen.
I see no reason to judge his moral character, although some might reflect that in Kantian general terms what he did was rather …
by Jonathan Cook / March 27th, 2018
The supposed “anti-semitism crisis” in Britain’s Labour party is revealing an interesting paradox at the heart of modern discussions of anti-semitism.
Undoubtedly there are those who intentionally exploit anti-semitism for political gain. That should be obvious if we pause to consider how much attention left-wing “anti-semitism” (criticism of Israel) – formerly promoted as the “New Anti-Semitism” – is receiving compared to the old-fashioned type of anti-semitism beloved of right wingers. They wanted Jews out of Britain (the Balfour Declaration, anyone?), denied the Holocaust, desecrated Jewish graves, or refused Jews entry to elite schools and golf clubs.
Because right wingers now love Israel, …
by Gilad Atzmon / March 27th, 2018
Jewish power, as I define it, is the power to suppress criticism of Jewish power.
For the last few days the Brits have been shown a spectacular display of that power and the manner in which it is mobilised. Without any attempt to hide their behaviour, a bunch of Jewish leaders have chosen to slander Europe’s biggest party and its popular leader in the name of ‘Jewish sensitivities.’
This blitz attack was sparked by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s reaction to a mural back in 2012. The mural was painted by US street artist Kalen Ockerman. Apparently, at the time Corbyn defended the …
by Stuart Littlewood / March 27th, 2018
The ‘usual suspects’ have again tried to destabilise Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the UK Labour party and damage his prospects of becoming prime minister by firing another anti-Semitism broadside.
They are the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council, members of various Friends of Israel and assorted Israel lobby dogsbodies and flag wavers including Tony Blair.
The opening shot was a letter from the Board of Deputies to the chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party, saying: “Today, leaders of British Jewry tell Jeremy Corbyn that enough is enough. We have had enough of hearing that Jeremy Corbyn ‘opposes …
by Jonathan Cook / March 27th, 2018
After a short reprieve following Jeremy Corbyn’s unexpected success in Britain’s general election last year, when he only narrowly lost the popular vote, most of the Labour parliamentary party are back, determined to bring him down. And once again, they are being joined by the corporate media in full battle cry.
Last week, Corbyn was a Soviet spy. This week we’re in more familiar territory, even if it has a new twist: Corbyn is not only a friend to anti-semites, it seems, but now he has been outed as a closet one himself.
In short, the Blairites in the parliamentary party are …
No Small Victory
by Binoy Kampmark / March 27th, 2018
It’s really quite incredible how, at nearly every turn the New Zealand government has managed to mess up the legal case against Kim Dotcom.
— Mike Masnick, Techdirt, March 26, 2018
Put it down to his tigerish perseverance, or sheer faith in those powers of endurance, but Kim Dotcom’s victory before New Zealand’s Human Rights Tribunal had a stirring ring to it. The Tribunal found for Dotcom, awarding him NZ$30,000 for “loss of a benefit” and NZ$60,000 for “loss of dignity and injury to feelings” incurred by breaches of the Privacy Act by the previous NZ Attorney-General.
In July 2015, Dotcom made …
by Robert Hunziker / March 27th, 2018
Everybody’s heard about global warming. It is one of the most advertised existential events of all time. Who isn’t aware? However, there’s a new kid on the block. An alarming loss of insects will likely take down humanity before global warming hits maximum velocity.
For the immediate future, the Paris Accord is riding the wrong horse, as global warming is a long-term project compared to the insect catastrophe happening right now! Where else is found 40% to 90% species devastation?
The worldwide loss of insects is simply staggering with some reports of 75% up to 90%, happening much faster than the paleoclimate …
by Shepherd Bliss / March 27th, 2018
Over a million students and allies walked out of classes in the U.S., from Maine to Hawaii, and elsewhere in the world on March 14. Ten days later, March 24, hundreds of thousands of defiant marchers flooded the streets in Washington, D.C., and at more than 800 places on every continent except Antarctica. What might they do next?
Many surviving Parkland students are becoming familiar faces in D.C. Politicians hear from them regularly and some respond positively. They have captured the nation’s attention with their soaring speeches and emotional chants at what is being described as “sibling marches.”
They are protesting the …
by Binoy Kampmark / March 26th, 2018
There was an audacity about it, carried out with amateurish callowness. As it turned out Australian batsman Cameron Bancroft, besieged and vulnerable, had been egged on by Australian cricket captain Steve Smith and the Australian leadership to do the insufferable: tamper with the ball.
Before the remorseless eagle eyes of modern cameras, Bancroft, in the third Test against South Africa in Cape Town, was detected possessing yellow adhesive tape intended to pick up dirt and particles that would, in turn, be used on the ball’s surface. This, it was assumed, was intended to give Smith’s team an advantage over an increasingly …
