Latest articles
by Gary Olson / August 28th, 2017
My take on Steve Bannon’s recent firing is at odds with the celebratory tone I detect from others, especially those claiming it’s a victory for decent people. It was nothing of the sort, and Bannon wasn’t banished for any of the reasons we’ve read about in mainstream media accounts.
Why was Bannon so objectionable, and to whom? Sure, he’s a white nationalist, bigoted, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, hate-mongering egomaniac. And like so many of his peers in the upper circles of the corporate, military and political world, he’s probably a psychopath. No problem.
He’s also a fervent disciple of capitalism, but, for his intra-elite enemies, …
by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin / August 28th, 2017
If it is a truism that after a war the victor writes the history, then it could be argued that the victor also chooses the language in which the history will be written. If it is a war of the colonised against the coloniser then the language takes on a special significance as typically the coloniser imposes their language on the colonised.
Paulo Freire described the way in which cultural conquest leads to the cultural inauthenticity of those who are invaded. They then start to take up the outlook of the invader in terms of their values, standards and goals. In …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / August 28th, 2017
A quagmire is defined as a complex or unpleasant position that is difficult to escape. President Trump’s recently announced war plans in Afghanistan maintain that quagmire. They come at a time when US Empire is failing and its leadership in the world is weakening. The US will learn what other empires have learned, “Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires.”
During the presidential campaign, some became convinced that Trump would not be an interventionist president. His tweets about Afghanistan were one of the reasons. In January of 2013, he …
by Binoy Kampmark / August 27th, 2017
It has been a week of bollards. And defence barriers. And hedges and vegetation. No, not the radio garden hour, or the herbaceous borders special featured on prime time television, delivered by a bearded man with a facial forest so vast it could regenerate several lost species.
This is the anti-terrorist flick of the week, and given that Australia’s Turnbull government is nearing its next blow, awaiting another stroke in the aftermath of the citizenship crisis, a suitably urgent package filled with alarmist goodies to distract the public was in the offing.
The Prime Minister was grave in his August 20 statement …
The Anti-Empire Report #150
by William Blum / August 26th, 2017
I’m back!!
It has recently been reported that Senator John McCain has an aggressive brain tumor. Not long ago I would have thought: “Good. It’ll be great to be rid of that neanderthal reactionary bastard!”
Not now. My kidneys are gone and I’m on (rather unpleasant) dialysis for the rest of my life. My separated-from German wife is in Germany and can’t fly because of the danger of blood clots forming and lodging in her lungs or heart. I’m an avid reader of medical news and almost every day I get choked-up and depressed by the never-ending heart-breaking stories of incurable pain …
by Richard Hugus / August 26th, 2017
On August 19, a week after a heavily publicized clash over a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, an estimated 8,000 people converged on Boston Common to protest a speaking event organized by a group calling itself the Boston Free Speech Movement. Who are the Boston Free Speech Movement and what do they stand for? We’ll never know because antifascists, leftists, anti-racists, and progressives of Boston prevented them from even speaking. Some might say this was a good thing — no one wants to hear from bigots (if that’s who they were) — but, in fact, the …
by Binoy Kampmark / August 26th, 2017
It was nothing short of fabulous. Before the public, the political lie is deemed an imperative, instinctively cultured to repel anything that might appear, let alone resemble, truth. Never, whatever you do in political garb, reveal the game, convey the reality, even if power is only held on trust. Those idiots (the voters, that is) won’t know.
Before the judicial bench, however, the same figures find themselves on the horns of a dilemma. Pull the wig over those judicial eyes – or risk perjuring yourself? With that in mind, the story about how the Nationals Senator Matt Canavan became an Italian …
by Paul Craig Roberts / August 25th, 2017
When I read Professor Thomas DiLorenzo’s article the question that leapt to mind was, “How come the South is said to have fought for slavery when the North wasn’t fighting against slavery?”
Two days before Lincoln’s inauguration as the 16th President, Congress, consisting only of the Northern states, passed overwhelmingly on March 2, 1861, the Corwin Amendment that gave constitutional protection to slavery. Lincoln endorsed the amendment in his inaugural address, saying “I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.”
Quite clearly, the North was not prepared to go to war in order to end slavery when on …
by Alison Weir / August 25th, 2017
In the wake of Charlottesville, numerous Americans have come forward to oppose racism in a variety of ways. In some cases this has taken the form of donations.
As a result, some allegedly anti-racist organizations have seen a financial bonanza. The main one seems to be the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which saw a 1,000% spike in donations – more than half by first-time donors.
There’s one problem. The ADL is a major supporter of racism.
On its website, the ADL claims it works to “secure justice and fair treatment to all.”
Unfortunately, that is far from the truth. The fact is that the ADL …
(1984 is probably the worst book of the 20th century)
by T.P. Wilkinson / August 25th, 2017
1984 is probably one of the worst books of the 20th century because of its mis-interpretation!
a) Although Orwell was writing about ENGLAND, in fact, and not as allegory, the exigencies of anti-Soviet propaganda required that the story be defined as a dystopia about the world under Soviet control. Whatever Orwell may have thought about Stalin, 1984 was a story directly attacking the Labour Party and the policies that would become enshrined in Labour governments dominated by graduates from Oxford and to a lesser extent Cambridge. Anyone outside of Britain might be forgiven at the time for missing this but today the oversight …
Street battles and drone attacks are all-of-a-piece
by Jason Hirthler / August 24th, 2017
Winston Churchill’s definition of history was simple but true: “One damn thing after another.” That’s the way the summer has unfolded, particularly the sticky and steamy month of August, historically a month when nerves are frayed and conflict simmers underneath an oppressive sun. So many events. So many angry voices. So little time spent on self-reflection. American fascism is back in the public eye, flaunting its wares and waking up the domestic population, which tends to snooze through the application of its imperial variant to all variety of freethinkers abroad. But the two are joined at the hip, fascism being …
by Yves Engler / August 24th, 2017
After amending the constitution to be able to run indefinitely Paul Kagame recently won 98.63% of votes in Rwanda’s presidential election. In response Canada’s High Commissioner Sara Hradecky tweeted “Congratulations to Rwandans for voting in peaceful presidential election” and “Canada congratulates Paul Kagame on his inauguration today as President of Rwanda”. The latter Tweet was picked up by the state propaganda organ New Times in a story titled “Heads of State, diplomats laud Kagame’s ‘visionary leadership’.”
If garnering 99% of the vote wasn’t a clue that Kagame is a dictator, the High Commissioner could’ve taken a look at Canada’s …
by Felicity Arbuthnot / August 24th, 2017
… war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children.
— Howard Zinn (1922-2919),”Violence Doesn’t Work”, The Progressive, July 18, 2007
All war represents a failure of diplomacy.
— Tony Benn MP., (1925-2014) Tony Benn: “His views on socialism, Europe, war and writing“, BBC News, March 14, 2014
No country too poor, too small, too far away, not to be threat, a threat to the American way of life.
— William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, Common Courage Press, October 1, 2005
The mention of one tiny country appears to strike …
by Ramzy Baroud / August 23rd, 2017
Not too far away from Seattle, Washington there are eight ballistic-missile submarines carrying the world’s large shipments of nuclear weapons.
The 560-foot-long black submarines are docked at the Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor, hauling what is described by Rick Anderson in a recent Los Angeles Times article as “the largest concentration of deployed nuclear weapons in the US.”
“If it were a sovereign nation,” Anderson wrote, quoting government estimates, “Washington State would be the third-largest nuclear-weapons power in the world.”
One is often haunted by this manifest reality, especially whenever a nuclear crisis between the US and North Korea flares up, such as the …
by Paul Majchrowicz / August 23rd, 2017
Elon Musk has been raging that artificial intelligence (AI) is more dangerous than nuclear weapons and is an ‘existential threat’ to the human race.
Musk seems to believe that once AI achieves self-awareness Terminators will bloom like weeds and the human race can kiss tomorrow goodbye. But is this really the threat that Musk is concerned with or is it something more mundane.
Capitalism is the agenda of corralling all of the world’s resources into private ownership. This is known as closing the commons. Once achieved no man could be self-sufficient. Gone would be the days when a man could hunt …
by Dr. Hakim / August 23rd, 2017
Ghulam (second from left) working on our community’s greenhouse, together with Zek, Khamad and Ali
Ali, Zekerullah, Khamad and I miss Ghulam and his family. We feel sad that life in Afghanistan had finally become too burdensome for them. They are now Afghan refugees in Iran.
We have known Ghulam for many years, Ali and Ghulam being distant relatives and the best of childhood friends. Ghulam lived in community with us for about five years. We were his second family, supporting one another through thick and thin.
Ghulam’s focus
Ghulam worked …
by Yves Engler / August 22nd, 2017
Some good might come in Canada from neo-fascists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Taking advantage of media interest in protests over monuments to historical figures with racist views activists in Halifax are pushing to remove commemorations to two individuals who helped conquer Africa. And there’s no lack of other such memorials to target across the Great White North.
In 1898 Henry Edward Clonard Keating led a small force that killed the chief of Hela and abducted several individuals from the village to operate canoes the soldiers had stolen from them. In response, others from the village in what is now southern Nigeria …
by David Penner / August 22nd, 2017
Prior to starting a regimen of CHOP chemotherapy at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, I sat down with my oncologist’s nurse who briefed me on some of the things I should expect from treatment, such as mouth sores, nausea, and other delightful stomach ailments that I had to look forward to. Never did she mention a word about post-chemotherapy cognitive impairment, also known as chemo brain.
Should you stop random people on the street and ask them what they think of when they think of chemotherapy, they will invariably rattle off some of the more commonly known …
by Shepherd Bliss / August 22nd, 2017
Sonoma County, Northern California — One of the United States’ top four cannabis-growing counties is Sonoma County, California. In 2016, it became legal for adults to consume marijuana in California. One of the nation’s first dispensaries, Peace in Medicine, was founded here.
Disclosure: I’m a Peace in Medicine patient in small town Sebastopol. CBD-rich cannabis improves my health. I support legal cannabis growing that follows the rules and does not endanger creeks, wildlife, or neighbors, especially children.
Cannabis is a front-page story in our daily Press Democrat. “Environmentalists say proposed cannabis grow rules fail to protect wildlife,” headlines an August 9, 2017, …
by Gary Brumback / August 21st, 2017
I was emotional. They are only fossils, but they have been human beings and very quickly you make a connection with these people who lived and died here 300,000 years ago.
— Dr. Jean-Jacques Hublin, Department of Human Development at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany
Human connectedness, the existence of a positive, physical, visual or mental association between two or more human beings, is like a chain across time. Searching for one’s ancestry through DNA testing, for example, is one way to lengthen the chain. As for Dr. Hublin, a paleontologist and director of the Department of …
by Joel S. Hirschhorn / August 21st, 2017
Liberals, progressive and Democrats should think critically about the negative impacts of widespread media bias on American democracy. There simply is no doubt that virtually all mainstream media regularly show their strong bias against president Trump and his administration. These media have convinced themselves that they are working to save American democracy from an incompetent, corrupt and dangerous president. And those on the left eat up the negative coverage, which means more money for the anti-Trump networks, newspapers and magazines. Never mind that he was elected fairly and legally.
It seems that the leftist media would only be happy if Trump …
by David Swanson / August 20th, 2017
Under the new policy just announced in Charlottesville, Virginia, the city will be taking down all but the non-racist war monuments and memorials in all of its public spaces.
Three monuments to the Confederate war, fought to maintain slavery — those of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and a generic Confederate soldier — will all be removed under the new guidelines.
In addition a heroic equestrian monument to George Rogers Clark is coming down, as Native American genocide has been ruled racist.
A statue of Lewis and Clark almost made the cut as not being a traditional war monument, but the figure of …
by Binoy Kampmark / August 19th, 2017
In few environments could this work. A member of Parliament (barely breathing, but still a parliament) running within a Muslim minority country (a small minority, at that) with mocking intent, dons a burka, sits in the stands, and receives appropriate mind bending outrage when she strips it off.
One thing can be said: Australia’s Pauline Hanson of her self-described One Nation Party was, in the basest way, impressive. She donned the religious garb of a religion she detests, whose injunctions and mores she barely knows how to enunciate. Her ignorance is profoundly encyclopaedic, and she is proud of it.
Her command of …
by Robert Jensen / August 19th, 2017
Now that the violence in Charlottesville has forced “white supremacy” into our political vocabulary, let’s ask an uncomfortable question: “When will the United States transcend white supremacy?”
My question isn’t, “What should we do about the overt white supremacists who, emboldened by Trumpism’s success, have pushed their way back into mainstream politics?” I want to go beyond easy targets to ask, “When will U.S. society—not just neo-Nazis and the Klan, but the whole country—reject all aspects of white supremacist ideology and take serious steps toward rectifying the material inequality justified by that ideology?”
The answer is obvious: Never.
There’s no evidence the dominant …
by Christy Rodgers / August 19th, 2017
The ultimate talisman of the primitive, of what the civilized call the dark ages of prehistory, is the image of tribal people cowering in fear and abasement at a reoccurring and entirely predictable phenomenon of the “clockwork universe,” the eclipse of the sun. Even civilizations with some form of recorded history but limited application of the scientific method are denigrated for their tendency to attribute this phenomenon to a sentient being. Creating a class of priests whose job it was to pretend they were capable of negotiating with the celestial entity generating this mystery was social hucksterism of the worst …
Cozumel was derived from the Mayan "Cuzamil" or "Ah Cuzamil Peten" in full, which means the island of swallows (Spanish: Isla de las Golondrinas)
by Paul Haeder / August 19th, 2017
With the power of the telecom thieves and my cellular phone, and, viola, I am conversing via text and downloaded images with my 21 year old daughter on the Island of Cozumel, with her mother, stuck in the maelstrom of tourists and a denuded ecosystem. Yes, I admit, I loved that island, 1979, 1983, 1987 (1989 was the last time I was there), but I knew my very presence, my ecological footprint, the baggage of being an American, a scuba enthusiast, journalist, too, and dive bum, all were part of what was starting to become very out of whack …
by Andre Vltchek / August 19th, 2017
After WWII, the West had one huge ‘problem’ on its hands: all three most populous Muslim countries on Earth – Egypt, Iran and Indonesia – were clearly moving in one similar direction, joining a group of patriotic, peaceful and tolerant nations. They were deeply concerned about the welfare of their citizens, and by no means were they willing to allow foreign colonialist powers to plunder their resources, or enslave their people.
In the 1950’s, the world was rapidly changing, and there was suddenly hope that the countries which were oppressed and pillaged for decades and centuries by first the European and …
by Graham Peebles / August 18th, 2017
Man-made climate change, and the interconnected environmental catastrophe more broadly constitute the most urgent crisis facing humanity. It has come about as the result of a certain way of life, a materialistic approach to living in which greed and excessive consumption has been championed.
Voracious consumerism and values based on individual material success, competition and division lie at the very heart of the crisis, and if global warming, desertification, pollution, and the destruction of ecological systems are to be arrested, a fundamental change in attitudes and behaviour is needed. Without this, little of substance can be achieved – technological advances, whilst …
by John Andrews / August 18th, 2017
Ever since he won the US presidency Donald Trump has attracted an unusually high amount of criticism from the mainstream media. This is extraordinary and quite unprecedented. The US president is normally treated by the press like a messiah, destined to lead mankind into some sort of American paradise. But Trump isn’t treated this way, and I don’t know why. He’s certainly no worse than any who preceded him in the last fifty years or more.
It isn’t easy criticising the US government – not because there isn’t much to criticise, but because it’s a fairly scary business: it wields awesome …
by Paul Larudee / August 18th, 2017
The March for Racial Justice is committed to standing for racial justice with allies from across all races, ethnicities, and communities.
— Statement of the March for Racial Justice regarding Yom Kippur
The March for Racial Justice correctly acknowledged its oversight in scheduling the march on Yom Kippur. It is an important oversight and an equally important apology, reaffirming the principles of the march.
But how serious are the organizers about those principles? Are they truly ready to denounce all racism everywhere? How do they feel about racists participating in the march, supposedly in solidarity, but actually forcing the march to compromise its …
