Latest articles
by Yves Engler / August 17th, 2015
Where are Conservatives most likely to be elected in Canada? Historically, rural and suburban White, Protestant ridings and the wealthiest parts of English-speaking cities have been where the Tories enjoyed the most success.
Certainly the Conservatives have never been the party of those marginalized for economic, social or religious reasons.
Yet, at the start of the month Stephen Harper launched his re-election campaign from the Ben Weider Jewish Community Centre in Mount Royal, one of two ridings in the country with a Jewish plurality (about 36% of the population).
If Conservative candidate Robert Libman wins Pierre Trudeau’s old seat it would represent a …
Part 4: Civilization in Transition
by George S. Svokos / August 17th, 2015
The news media recently reported that the Mashco Piro Indians in the Peruvian Amazon have been pushed out of their environment of evolutionary adaptation that they have occupied for at least 600 years because of commercial concerns and natural resource extraction (same old story.) An added complication here is that the Mashco Piro are the last uncontacted tribe in this area of South America. In the interests of holy preservation, why cannot these people just be left to themselves? They are, or were, a self-sufficient hunter-gatherer society that required no “assistance” from the developed world. It would seem they will …
American Psychological Association acts to heal itself
by William Boardman / August 16th, 2015
American psychologists have voted overwhelmingly against helping their government torture people. In an even more radical step, the psychologists voted to obey international law, even in instances where US law tolerates war crimes or crimes against humanity. In an even more radical step, the psychologists voted to obey international law, even in instances where US law tolerates war crimes or crimes against humanity. erwhelmingly against helping their government torture people. In an even more radical step, the psychologists voted to obey international law, even in instances where US law tolerates …
Part 3: Symbols of Transformation
by George S. Svokos / August 14th, 2015
The Self or Anthropos quaternio symbolically represents what we cannot, in fact, see. Carl Jung’s Aion, Volume 9 of his Collected Works brilliantly describes the Self and shadow archetypes as quaternios. Archetypes only become visible through their symbols, not themselves as such. Anthropos is a reflection of the “higher Adam” (Self, or the center of the unconscious) and occupies the upper apex of the diamond-shaped quaternio which is joined at its base by a mirror image of itself. Thus, the diamond appears to be two pyramids attached at their bases with an apex point and a basal point. The basal …
by Binoy Kampmark / August 14th, 2015
“From what GOP faction might Trumpites come? The establishment? Social conservatives? Unlikely.”
— George F. Will, The Washington Post, August 12, 2015
The raging, erratic fire refuses to go out. The longer the Donald flame flickers and burns in its impetuous, cartoonish way, the more the GOP is agitated in recoiling horror. In itself, this assessment suggests that the GOP is the vestal virgin being assaulted by the barbarian who is not merely at the gates but in the bed chamber.
The conservative commentariat have gathered their pens in what is becoming a united front against Donald Trump. Their anger is an indicator, …
by Andre Vltchek / August 14th, 2015
I don’t really know, I don’t understand how it feels: to live in a rich European country, which is rich mainly because it has been directly plundering many poor nations around the world. Or it has been plundering by association, through its membership in some extremist organization like NATO. To live there, refusing to acknowledge why it is rich, how it became rich.
Palaces, theatres, railroads, hospitals and parks in that rich country are built on broken skeletons and restless specters, on lakes of blood and shameless theft.
Then, when one looted country after another begins to sink, when there is nothing …
by Nizar Visram / August 13th, 2015
News coming out of the occupied Palestine on 8 August 2015 said that Saad Dawabsheh, the father of a Palestinian toddler Ali who was killed in a firebombing of his home a week ago, has died from wounds he sustained in the incident.
Early in the morning of July 31, Israeli settlers hurled a Molotov cocktail into a window of Dawabsheh’s home in the Duma village in occupied West Bank. His 18-month-old son, Ali was burned to death in the arson attack, while his four-year-old son Ahmad, and his wife, Riham were seriously injured and remain in critical condition.
The arsonists left …
by Graham Peebles / August 13th, 2015
We all want peace, don’t we? Peaceful relationships and communities; an absence of violence and conflict: a World at Peace. This is surely everyone’s heartfelt desire. Without peace nothing can be achieved, none of the subtler essential needs of our time, such as feeding everyone and providing good quality health care and education to all – let alone the urgent need to save our planet (S.O.P.), beautify the cities and develop sustainable alternative energy sources.
Despite the fact that we all hanker after peace, there are currently around thirty armed conflicts taking place across the globe – wars in which …
And how we can best end it
by Jack Balkwill / August 13th, 2015
To get a job is like that haystack needle,
‘Cause where we live, they don’t use colored people
— Stevie Wonder, “Livin’ for the City”
I was raised in a racist family, in a racist neighborhood and a racist world, in the 1940s and ’50s. In those days everyone around me was white, almost always and almost everywhere I went in Tacoma, Washington. The man who swept our street with a push broom was white. The cop who walked the beat which included my neighborhood was white. All of the delivery people– the milk man, the ice man, and all of the tradesmen.
One …
by Fernando Andres Torres / August 12th, 2015
August 7, 2015. Yes. I cannot find a better analogy to place Manuel Contreras in his right place, and I don’t want to leave out other good candidates such as the likes of Göring, Himmler, or Hess. Every now and then a creature is produced that shames our species and besmirches our collective conscience and history.
Manuel Contreras, aka El Mamo, died today in a comfortable bed at a military hospital in Chile. He was the brains behind the DINA, Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, the Chilean Gestapo who killed, tortured, raped and sent to concentration camps and/or exiled thousands of Chileans …
by John R. Hall / August 12th, 2015
In 1953 at the age of 5, I was positive that I’d grow up to be Superman. When George Reeves paid his weekly visit to the family television set I was ready. With a dish towel cape, hands upon my hips, wearing an invincible expression, I was ready to battle the bad guys with truth, justice, the American way, incredible strength, and an unparalleled flying technique.
But even Superman had his Kryptonite. Now, 62 years later, my Achilles’ heel turned out to be fair skin. Too many severe sunburns in the Sonoran Desert came back to haunt. Basal cell carcinoma now decorated my upper lip.
The procedure to remove this face invader …
by Gary Brumback / August 12th, 2015
I conceived of “twittersod” a few years ago as a possible means of mobilizing millions of activist tweeters to “save our democracy” from two powerful elements of America that are making life miserable and worse for humanity.
One is America’s corpocracy, about which I have written extensively. Big corporations rule our government, not the reverse. Big corporations continuously commit wrongdoing that harms people sometimes in dangerous and deadly ways yet escape accountability because their, not our, government maintains a hands-off policy toward them. Their government also gives them handouts totaling billions of dollars yearly that could otherwise be spent to …
by Felicity Arbuthnot / August 12th, 2015
This fortress built by Nature for her self
Against infection and the hand of war,
….
This precious stone set in a silver sea
…
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England…
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege …
— William Shakespeare, 1564-1616, Richard II
Britain’s top “diplomat”, Foreign Office Minister Philip Hammond has accused “marauding” migrants – the desperate, dispossessed, bereaved, orphaned children even, attempting to reach the UK, where many have relatives, contacts or speak the language – of threatening Britain and Europe’s “standard of living.”
In a racist rant he told the BBC:
Europe can’t protect itself …
by Ramzy Baroud / August 12th, 2015
Strange how intellectual discussion concerning the so-called “Arab Spring” has almost entirely shifted in recent years – from one concerning freedom, justice, democracy and rights in general, into a political wrangle between various antagonist camps.
The people who revolted across various Arab countries are now marginalized in this discussion and are only used as fodders – killers and victims – in a war seemingly without end.
But how did it all go so wrong?
There was once a time when things were so simple, so easy to understand and explain: People, who were long oppressed, revolted against their oppressors (Arab regimes) and benefactors …
by T.P. Wilkinson / August 12th, 2015
Jose Saramago wrote a novel translated as The Stone Raft, published in 1986. It appeared in English in 1994. The story is quite remarkable if simple. One day it appears that the entire Iberian peninsula—for the “geographically challenged”, that is the land mass comprising Spain, Portugal and the British dependency of Gibraltar– ruptures and begins to separate from the rest of the European peninsula. Quite independently several inhabitants of this land mass had premonitions of this bizarre event. When the governments involved discover this two parallel processes are first unleashed. Official plans emerge to pour enough cement into the gaping …
by Denis Rancourt / August 12th, 2015
Three brilliant political theories on how to optimally organize and maintain society’s economic and power structures were described by Karl Marx, Adam Smith, and anarchists such as Michael Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, which are, respectively:
Communism (or socialism) [see… The Communist Manifesto]
Capitalism (not the present beast by the same name) [see… The Wealth of Nations]
Anarchism [see… you’re on your own!]
None of these models can result in a stable large-scale society because spontaneous creation and growth of dominance hierarchies will always occur, and the resulting dominance hierarchies continuously consume or …
Part 2: Nosferatu is Risen
by George S. Svokos / August 12th, 2015
Our next iconic avatar would naturally arrive on the scene near the end of 19th century as Dracula. However, the 1922 cult classic silent film Nosferatu made in breach of the Dracula copyright actually serves our heuristic purposes better. Although the stories are essentially the same, with the underlying incest theme discussed by anthropologist Robin Fox in The Tribal Imagination, the evil cleric finally looks like a sinister archpriest. The symbolic development or growth in its imago change has gone from dandy, to grandiose filthy blood sucking (energy draining) old man, to filthy old energy draining high cleric. Interesting to …
The Conference of 52 Presidents of the Major American (sic) Jewish Organizations and the US-Iran Nuclear Agreement
by James Petras / August 12th, 2015
Prologue
In the village of Duma, an 18 month old Palestinian baby died following the fire-bombing of his family’s home by Israeli settlers. The father of the child died of burns a week later and the surviving mother and young sibling are barely alive – covered with burns from racist Jewish arson. The United Nations Special Committee to investigate Israel’s practices toward Palestinians in Israeli occupied territory have revealed that the ‘root cause’ of the escalating violence is the ‘continuous policy of Jewish settlement expansion (financed and …
by Binoy Kampmark / August 12th, 2015
E.H. Carr suggested in his lectures that formed What is History? that one can only really understand history through understanding the historian. To understand the historian, one then casts an eye towards circumstances, the background of gestation, product and ultimate shaping behind that process.
Robert Conquest, accomplished poet and historian who died on August 3, was the great example of the historian as process. He gathered his material with what amounted to an almost penitent objective (many historians do, feeling that the truth is beavering its way to the pen of revelation). Such histories do become political weapons, furnishings for furious …
by Dr. Hakim and the Afghan Peace Volunteers / August 11th, 2015
Last week, the Afghan Peace Volunteers celebrated the first anniversary of the Borderfree Nonviolence Community Center. Check out the address from Dr. Hakim on August 7th, 2015, and a video from the APVs.
A year ago, at the inauguration of Borderfree Nonviolence Community Centre, the first of its kind in Afghanistan, I had said that love can open every border.
I believe in that love, but as wars rage on in Afghanistan and many places of the world today, it seems that instead of borders being broken, our hearts are being broken.
Many of us feel broken.
War breaks us.
But we can rely …
The Trial and Sentencing of Amer Jubran
by Noah Cohen / August 11th, 2015
On July 29, 2015, the trial of Palestinian activist Amer Jubran in Jordan reached its predictable conclusion: 10 years with hard labor for phony “terrorism” offenses, based at least in part on laws manufactured after his arrest.
Last year I wrote an article about the circumstances of Amer’s arrest and detention. At that time he was being held without charges, after being seized from his home in the middle of the night and held incommunicado at an undisclosed location for over 2 months.
In August of 2014, he was finally given a list of charges against him. These included the charge …
by Robert Hunziker / August 11th, 2015
A lone polar bear on a small sheet of ice has become an iconic image of global warming. Unfortunately, the image of the distraught polar bear sends a beguiling image that renders the dangers of global warming a disservice.
A better image, or icon, would be a massive 100-foot thick naturally coagulated renegade iceberg broadsiding an oil rig. More on this truly catastrophic event later.
National Geographic, President Obama, and the Circumpolar Flaw Lead System Study (International Polar Year Project) have brought worldwide attention to the most fearsome challenge to the planet’s ecosystem in human history. It’s all about the Great Northern …
by Ted Glick / August 11th, 2015
What is the relationship between organizing to slow, stop and reverse the climate crisis, a very big job with a very close deadline, and organizing to bring together a unified movement against our oppressive system that links people concerned about climate, racial justice, women’s and LGBT rights, labor rights, peace, social and economic justice, equality and more?
This is the third column I have written on this subject. My first one, last November, was in the form of an Open Letter to Naomi Klein in connection with how she addressed this issue in her wonderful book, “This Changes Everything.” The …
by James Hoover / August 11th, 2015
Evidence has mounted that the presidential election of 2000 was probably stolen by George W. Bush in the days leading up to and following voting on November 7, 2000. Now fifteen years later, there are three, whose fingerprints were all over the effort, now standing in positions of power – one has already been instrumental in changing the way elections are held, a process now more chaotic and less democratic. The other two are running for president as Republicans.
Chief Justice John Roberts was in the thick of the contested election in Florida in 2000. He was a known and …
Part I: Dis-association Gets a Name
by George S. Svokos / August 11th, 2015
The modern trope and symbol for the sinister archpriest likely requires some analysis to give it meaning in three dimensions, and to put this being into some kind of social context related to the present spirit of the times. At first, this may seem like an impossible task, given the media’s proliferation in everyday life. When therefore, is the individual not inundated with a glut of images in print, social media, television, satellite, cable stations, etc., that can even be accessed on one’s personal cell phone, tablet or other electronic devices? The human mind has the capacity to recognize and …
by Paul Cochrane / August 11th, 2015
An online video of Indian MP Shashi Tharoor arguing that Britain should pay India reparations for its colonial legacy has gone viral. It prompted much enthusiasm in the Indian press and parliament, as well as responses in the British press arguing both for and against Tharoor’s proposal. Interestingly, it also prompted a short article in the Guardian newspaper, ‘How much did you really learn about the British empire in school?”
The article did not really answer the title’s question, even though the answer is ‘bugger all’.
It is quite extraordinary that British school children learn essentially nothing about an empire …
by Brian Terrell / August 10th, 2015
In recent weeks, I have been part of a haphazard and ad hoc process to compose an open letter to Pope Francis in advance of his September, 2015 visit to the United States. The promotion of this letter has been taken up by Friends of Franz Jagerstatter, a community of peacemakers inspired by the Austrian Catholic farmer who was martyred for his refusal to fight in the German Army during World War II.
Pope Francis’ recent comments regarding war, the environment and economic justice inspire our letter, which cites segments of his new encyclical, Laudato Si. “War always does …
by Jason Hirthler / August 10th, 2015
It’s fairly obvious to keen observers that Turkey’s Recep Erdogan is not the moderate reformist he once pretended to be, back when Turkey harbored fantasies of joining a surging European Union. In the end, the EU’s temporizing about Turkey’s entry turned out to be a blessing in disguise for Ankara. And now, with the EU in dire straits as Germany savages debtor colonies on the union’s periphery, Erdogan has turned East and finally shed his Western-facing Kemalist disguise, revealing himself for an Islamist with dreams of a recrudescent Ottoman Empire. Neo-Ottomanism is essentially a pivot back to the East, …
Anti-Water Charge Campaigners’ Victory
by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin / August 10th, 2015
Anti-water charge campaigners had a major moral victory over government plans to make the people pay for the financial crisis when Eurostat determined that Irish Water had failed the Market Corporation Test. One reason given was that “sales must cover at least 50pc of production costs. This is further amplified by the high number of households not paying their bills,” Eurostat said. It is estimated that “57 percent of the people are refusing to pay the water charges” and that of the 43 percent who did pay, many were intimidated by landlords or solicitors collecting for the …
by Andre Vltchek / August 10th, 2015
A small town of Distomo is just 150 kilometers from Athens, positioned in the heart of Greece, literally squeezed between two great world heritage sites: Delphi, the cradle of the European democracy, and a stunning Byzantine monastery of Hossios Luckas.
But Distomo is much more than some picturesque village surrounded by mountains and history. Here, On June 10, 1944, according to Greek government records, but also according to Western mass media sources like the BBC, “for over two hours, Waffen-SS troops of the 4th SS Polizei Panzergrenadier Division under the command of SS-Hauptsturmführer Fritz Lautenbach went door to door and massacred …
