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France claims to be a Republic espousing freedom, liberty and fraternity but it has become a police state and is clamping down hard on intellectuals that dare exercise freedom of expression.

George Washington once said, “If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughterhouse.” ((George Washington, address to the officers of the army, Newburgh, New York (March 15, 1783); reported in John C. Fitzpatrick, ed, The Writings of George Washington (1938), vol. 26, p. 225.)) France it seems has pushed its intellectuals into silence to hasten the dumbing down of …

Since the New Year there has been a lot of speculation in the mainstream and alternative media about Saudi Arabia and Turkey directly intervening into the war in Syria. Each week there have been threats, demands, and sabre rattling from Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Meanwhile, there is the growing momentum of the Syrian Armed Forces on the killings fields of Syria. To be blunt, the Saudi royal family and Erdogan’s Mafia clan are apoplectic about the series of defeats that their proxy forces are suffering at the hands of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allies.

This sense of dismay …

The anger, xenophobia, and polarization so sharply on view on Super Tuesday didn’t come about overnight, or even since the Great Recession began or since 9/11 in 2001. It’s been a long time brewing, a product of some 50 years of unfolding bipartisan crisis.

A lot gets blamed on Republicans by progressives and liberals. It’s easy to see why, given the mean-spirited politics of their current leading candidates – not just Donald Trump, but Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio as well. However, since 1961, Democrats have held the presidency half the time and controlled the House and Senate 68 percent of …

Does the long tradition of Japanese learners cleaning their own schools prove the Japanese educational system is much more community oriented rather than being self-oriented?

It is true that in Japan learners are responsible for cleaning the classrooms and rest of school. It is also true of Korea and China.

As far as Japan goes, this provokes two responses from me. First, the Japanese education system is more a reflection of the state and its designs for the wider Japanese society. Second, there is an ethos held in Japanese society, a reflection of …

If raw, naked propaganda makes you sick, stay away from South Korea (ROK)!

While the Western brain-conditioning machine wants you to believe that it is actually the North that is successfully indoctrinating its citizens, those of us who have worked on both sides of the border (or on both sides of the “DMZ”) know much better. And if they don’t tell, they lie!

From the “art work” on both sides of the barbed wire fences, to the institutions designated to brainwash millions of common people, South Korea is leading; its regime’s propaganda (and the propaganda of its Western handlers) is much …

What are the messages Iranians signaled by their robust election campaign and high turn out? Western nay-sayers say it shows discontent. But perhaps with a touch of envy, at a time when western politics is rife with discontent and yet elicits at best a yawn, or at worse, looks more like a circus. The Islamic revolution has had bad press in the West from the start, but the results show a level of freedom that contrasts favorably with the West, and puts paid to the mantra that the 2009 elections were stolen by the bad guys.

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It might be worthwhile for supporters of Hillary Clinton to consider that, as of the last week or two, they are bedfellows with members of the most odious U.S. political movement in recent memory: neoconservatism. That’s right—in a not-so-surprising twist, America’s most vocal and unapologetic war-lovers are starting to imply allegiance to the doyenne of the Democratic Party.

Eliot Cohen, former official of George W. Bush’s unholy State Department, called Hillary Clinton “the lesser evil, by a large margin.” The greater evil, of course, is Donald Trump, who in Cohen’s estimation would be “an unmitigated disaster for American foreign policy.” While …

As Hillary Clinton emerges as the front-runner for the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, she is receiving increased scrutiny for her years as Secretary of State. Many are criticizing her hawkish foreign policy, which is the best indication of what President Hillary’s foreign policy would be, with many focusing on her long relationship with Saudi Arabia.

On Christmas Eve in 2011, Hillary Clinton and her closest aides celebrated a $29.4 billion sale of over 80 F-15 fighter jets, manufactured by U.S.-based Boeing Corporation, to Saudi Arabia. In a chain of enthusiastic emails, an aide exclaimed that it was “not a bad …

This article was prepared for the Ontario Civil Liberties Association (OCLA). It is also posted on ocla.ca.

Overall Summary

Part 1: Defamation law in Canada is contrary to international law, in both design and practice. Under international law, the right to hold an opinion is absolute, and the right of freedom of expression can be restricted “for respect of the rights or reputations of others” solely using written laws that must conform to the “strict tests of necessity and proportionality”. With Canadian civil defamation law, the state has unfettered discretion from an unwritten common law that provides presumed falsity, presumed malice, …

Geopolitics determines domestic policy.

This is apparent in the client country “Canada”, where no sovereignty is allowed, and where domestic policy is entirely about preventing any emergence of actual democracy.

It is glaringly obvious, to anyone who escapes the constant institutional social-engineering restrictions and blaring propaganda amplified by all the media, that US-led geopolitics determines every aspect of state management in Canada.

That US-led geopolitics determines every aspect of state management in Canada is true in every area of state involvement:

regulation of politics
social policy
health policy
educational and student-debt policy
prison and police complex
domestic surveillance complex
slave banking and monetary policy
corporate tax and royalties policies
zero resistance against …

Recollection, Kamal Aljafari’s mesmerizing film, is the dream of a cameraman, recapturing the city he loves. The dream veers from transcendental to nightmarish as the beautiful old buildings morph into concrete monstrosities. Carts become wildly veering cars, and plows become bulldozers. But none of this happens sequentially; we see the city and its changes as a dreamer does, in flashes without obvious narrative and in an order that is sporadic rather than chronological. In his description of his film, Aljafari writes, “As in a dream, the search for answers cannot provide any.”  In making this film, Aljafari has …

Changes in our perception of reality usually arrive in small doses. Unexpected, tiny, bitter bites of truth offer us several choices. The vast majority of insouciant humans choose the route of denial, completely ignoring the possibility of an alternate version of what is real and what is not. Others cautiously taste the troubling morsels, then spit them out, trying desperately to forget them as nothing but irritating, nasty mistakes, then returning quickly to the sweet, familiar, satisfying flavor of the corporate matrix. Then there are those of us who, having once tasted the caustic flavor of truth, return for seconds …

Basic Income is a serious proposal necessary to address many of the economic problems facing the developed world. Let us start by defining what Basic Income is. For that, the Green Party’s paper on the subject is helpful:

Basic Income (sometimes called Citizen’s Income or Universal Basic Income) is a guaranteed, non-means-tested income, sufficient to cover basic needs, payable to every woman, man and child legally resident in the UK. It would replace personal tax-free allowances, and most social security benefits. Children would receive a reduced Basic Income, Child Benefit. People who are disabled and lone parents would be …

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Where do we go from here?

From the moment Karl Marx put pen to paper, pro-capitalist political commentators and academics have attempted to bury his ideas. But successive generations of political activists have continually turned to Marx’s ideas, from working class labor activists who joined the various communist and socialist parties in the early 20th century, to student radicals who stood up to the horrors of Vietnam war in the 1960s. All have bravely embraced Marx’s searing indictment of capitalism and the nature of class antagonisms resulting in revolution. Today, with millions around the world plunged into the indignity and pain …

Do Black (Haitian) lives matter to Canada’s leading ‘left-wing’ foreign-policy think tank? Apparently not as much as having the corporate media mention their work by getting in bed with militarism disguised as peacekeeping.

At the start of Black History Month the Ottawa-based Rideau Institute co-published Unprepared for Peace?: The decline of Canadian peacekeeping training (and what to do about it). On the cover of the report a white Canadian soldier, with a massive M-16 strapped around his shoulder, is bent over to hold the hand of a young black boy. In the background are Canadian and UN colours.

A call for the Canadian Forces to offer …