The word “fascism” is a lightning rod. No one wants to be called a fascist. Everyone is ready to call someone else a fascist.
Like many highly charged words, the more common its usage becomes, the more inexact its meaning becomes.
Today, Trump is a fascist, Putin is a fascist, Modi is a fascist, Radical Islam is Islamofascism, the House and Senate members who passed the FISA renewal are fascists, Ukraine is a fascist country, political correctness is fascism, anti-Zionists are fascists, Zionists are fascists, and so on….
Clearly, the word “fascism” in these contexts is most often an expression of extreme …
Most people take around 10 minutes to decide what show to stream and around 3 minutes to decide what to order off of a restaurant menu. An Israeli intelligence officer said he took about 20 seconds to decide whether to add a human being to a kill list based on suggestions generated by “Lavender,” an artificial intelligence system powered by data Israel has collected from its surveillance of Palestinian communities. Then, the Israeli military uses another AI system, sadistically named “Where’s Daddy?”, to strike targets at home with their families. Learn more about Lavender, Where’s Daddy?, …
It was much like witnessing a boy killing flies, with a slight afterthought of apology. The spokesman for the Israeli Defense Forces, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, did little to acquit himself, or the cause, as to why more Palestinian civilians had been indulgently killed in yet another Israeli air strike. “Despite our efforts to minimize civilian casualties during the strike, the fire that broke out was unexpected and unintended … Our investigation seeks to determine what may have caused such a large fire to ignite.”
The release commences with the usual garnish. The strike, despite resulting in deaths in a …
A two-state solution (that is, having two independent separate nations) in Palestine-Israel would definitely be an improvement. However, it would not challenge and threaten the forces of imperialism because Zionist Israel and Hamas would still be allowed to exist if there are two separate nations. Furthermore, land disputes between the two nations would continue. The forces of imperialism include the imperial nations such as the United States, the military-industrial complex, and NATO.
Jerusalem in Palestine-Israel is a holy city for Christians, Muslims, and Jews. If we can solve the problems in this region of the world, everything else will be a piece of cake. What happens …
The world of energy struggles with the nearly impossible task of getting off fossil fuels. This requires thinking outside of the box, something revolutionary bustling with energy that bails us out of sluggish fossil fuels that emit too much CO2 into the atmosphere and rapidly overheats the planet. The CO2/global warming relationship, joined at the hip, must come to an end, or it’ll self-destruct everything in sight.
In the face of ultra-rapid technological developments, oil and gas production is old and dirty and slow and captures unbelievable sums of money for few people by removing the remains of dead organisms found …
The Biden administration has quietly given Ukraine permission to strike inside Russia — solely near the area of Kharkiv — using U.S.-provided weapons, three U.S. officials and two other people familiar with the move said Thursday, a major reversal that will help Ukraine to better defend its second-largest city.
“The president recently directed his team to ensure that Ukraine is able to use U.S. weapons …
From 28 April, heavy rains, strong winds, and widespread flooding have lashed the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, killing over 160 people and impacting 2.3 million. The waters rose and rose again, rushing through houses and fields, erasing not only homes and the memories built there but also many crops in the country’s largest rice-producing state and agricultural powerhouse, the impacts of which are likely to reverberate across the nation.
Meteorological agencies and officials predicted the events …
When Nicaragua accused Germany of aiding and abetting Israel’s genocide in Gaza at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) last month, readers of corporate media might have seriously wondered whether Nicaragua’s case had any legitimacy.
The case targeted Germany as the second biggest supplier of arms to Israel, because the US, Israel’s biggest supplier, does not accept the court’s jurisdiction on this issue. The object (as Nicaragua’s lawyer explained) was to create a precedent with wider application – that countries must take responsibility for the consequences of their arms sales to avoid them being used in breach of international law.
If America’s schools are to impart principles of freedom and democracy to future generations, they must start by respecting the constitutional rights of their students
Take the case of Lucas Hudson.
With all the negative press being written about today’s young people, it’s refreshing to meet a young person who not only knows his rights but is prepared to stand up for them.
Lucas is a smart kid, a valedictorian of his graduating class at the Collegiate Academy …
I suppose my title could have been couched in the singular form, as Hermann Hesse, the Nobel Prize winning German/Swiss author, did with his collection of anti-war essays about World War I (the war to end all wars that didn’t), If The War Goes On . . .
Or more appropriately, I might have eliminated that conditional “If” since it seems Pollyannish.
It’s a long hard road, this anti-war business. During the first Cold War and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis in the early sixties when Kennedy and Krushchev narrowly avoided blowing the world to smithereens, Bob Dylan put it right …
It was a pitiful sight. Soaked and literally washed-out, the feeble thin British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, made an announcement that caught many in his party by surprise. On July 4, the United Kingdom will be going to the polls. Necks will find themselves in nooses and placed in the guillotine – metaphorically speaking. The stretch to slaughter has been laid out. The oddity of this drenched occasion was made all the more pungent by a protester playing, in most audible fashion, the anthem of Tony Blair’s Labour’s victory in 1997, Things Can Only Get Better.
Konstantin Kisin: An immigrant's love letter to the West, 2022
by Eric Walberg / May 30th, 2024
Konstantin Kisin emigrated to Britain in 1993 at age 11, to join the flood of Russian emigres, high and low, looking for a new life. Kisin is the usual: loves the West, hates the Soviet Union, hates Putin. Ironically, the best writing in this billet doux is Kisin’s depiction of the Soviet Union as genuinely socialist: health care, free education, economic equality. His paean to the freedom and dignity that many in the West take for granted, as reviewed by Peter Boghossian, is self parody. Kisin is also a stand-up comic, …
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant at a press conference in Tel Aviv on October 28, 2023. POOL / VIA REUTER
Senator Lindsay Graham was bursting with contempt for the International Criminal Court (ICC) when he grilled Secretary of State Blinken at a May 21 Congressional hearing. Wagging his finger, he warned that, if the ICC gets away with issuing arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, “we are next.”
The audience at the …
The idea that the Anglo-American Empire wages war by mistake is not new. Nor are the kinds of mistake novel. There appears to be an entire school of historical literature based on the premise that when the paragons of benevolence among the English-speaking peoples go forth to war then it is almost entirely unintentional. Apologist from down under, Christopher Clark, made a great impression with his slightly Germanophilic addition to the literature ten years ago. Belligerence is conceded occasionally, like when some functionary pronounces that the mainly brown people on the …
Professor Jeffrey Sachs is the President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He is the author of many best selling books, including The End of Poverty and The Ages of Globalization. Here he is with probably the smartest and most accurate assessment of the Ukraine war, and American foreign policy more broadly, ever caught on tape.
Several times over the past two decades, I have written about the malevolence of Israel (and by that I mean Zionist Israel, which is predominantly Jewish, although there are likeliest quislings among the Palestinian ranks, e.g., Mahmoud Abbas). Israel is part of Historical Palestine. However, the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine wrested a chunk of Historical Palestine away from Palestinians.
Since its inception, Israel, the self-declared Jewish State, has been staunchly backed by the US with the tacit support of other western nations. Israel, indeed, has a powerful lobby.
Israel has managed to chip away at the original 1947 UN …
France’s Emmanuel Macron can, at times, show himself at odds with the grime and gristle of grounded politics. Able to pack in various snatches of philosophical reflection in a speech, straddling the highs and lows of a rhetorical display, his political acumen has, at times, deserted him.
Nothing is more evident of this than his treatment of New Caledonia, a Pacific French territory annexed in 1853 and assuming the title of a non-self-governing territory in 1946. Through its tense relationship with France and the French settlers, the island territory has been beset by periodic bursts of violence and indigenous indignation. Pro-independence …
Dual Power, sometimes referred to as counter-power, is a stage in a revolutionary movement where two competing political frameworks occupy the same space. For anti-state revolutionaries this implies a significant mobilization of people organizing autonomously and outside of and against existing power structures and institutions.
In this episode of A is for Anarchy, we examine the historical origins of dual power and analyze current examples and those throughout history.
World heat is worse than ever. The entire planet is sweating.
Every summer is hot but never like this. In America, it’s a national election year in the face of global record heat. What are candidates’ positions on CO2-infused heat? Graph by Brian Brettschneider, PhD, Climatologist
It’s extremely significant that global heat is just as bad in the world’s oceans, which have absorbed 85-90% of planetary heat, serving as a heat reservoir for decades. But now, the oceans are starting to strut their hot stuff. According to Copernicus, April was the 13th …
Earning enough to pay the rent or mortgage, cover utility bills and travel costs, buy food and have the occasional coffee is difficult, impossible for many.
But it’s not hard for everyone, is it? There are a small number of people living among us who don’t have to worry about the bills, are not troubled when food prices increase or rents balloon.
They are the rich and the obscenely rich. On the surface they look like the rest of us, but they live in a completely different world to the one most of us inhabit. A pristine space of privilege and political …
U.S. Memorial Day, originally intended as a solemn day of mourning for families of dead veterans has long become an opportunity for jingoistic war celebration, deceiving politicians and recruiting officers to parade and glorify warfare as a means to entrap young volunteers for future wars.
Instead of solemn mourning, on Memorial Day, war promoting corporate media, having tricked so many Americans into fighting and dying in unjust, murderous wars based on lies, now hypes our loved ones’ inglorious death as beautiful military service to entice recruits for their continuing wars.
The newly elected leader of Taiwan, Lai Ching-te, said in his May 20 inaugural speech, that all of China is one country, which is ruled by the leader of Taiwan, himself. His argument for this was that when the forces of (the Truman-backed) Chiang Kai-shek, who were beaten by the forces of Mao Tse-tung, escaped to the Japanese-occupied island of Taiwan after Japan was defeated in WW2, they set up a Government there and proclaimed it to be the Government of China and created a ‘Constitution’ for …
In 1812, need I say more, Reginald Heber composed the hymn of the Church Militant, the text of which bears citation in full:
The Son of God goes forth to war, a kingly crown to gain; his blood red banner streams afar: who follows in his train? Who best can drink his cup of woe, triumphant over pain, who patient bears his cross below, he follows in his train.
That martyr first, whose eagle eye could pierce beyond the grave; who saw his Master in the …
Israel's stooges in the West squirm as their adoration for the apartheid state turns sour
by Stuart Littlewood / May 25th, 2024
UK foreign secretery Lord David Cameron has told peers: “I don’t believe for one moment that seeking these warrants is going to help get the hostages out, it’s not going to help get aid in and it’s not going to help deliver a sustainable ceasefire. To draw moral equivalence between the Hamas leadership and the democratically-elected leader of Israel I think is just plain wrong.”
He misses the point as usual. The warrants have nothing to do with that. They are about bringing those wanted for the most grievous war crimes to justice.
On the evening of 14 May, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken climbed onstage at Barman Dictat in Kyiv, Ukraine, to pick up an electric guitar and join the Ukrainian punk band 19.99. Ukrainians, he said, are ‘fighting not just for a free Ukraine, but for a free world’. Blinken and 19.99 then played the chorus of Neil Young’s ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’, entirely ignoring the …
Throwing caution to the wind, grasping the nettle, and every little smidgen of opportunity, Australia’s opposition leader, Peter Dutton, was thrilled to make a point in the gurgling tumult of the Israel-Hamas war. Israel’s leaders, he surmised, had been hard done by the International Criminal Court’s meddlesome ways. Best for Australia, he suggested, to cut ties to the body to show its solidarity for Israel.
Dutton had taken strong issue with the announcement on May 20 by ICC prosecutor Karim A.A. Khan that requests for five arrest warrants had been sought in the context of the Israel-Hamas War. They included Hamas …
Photo Credit: Rainforest Trust
“A major question is whether a large-scale collapse of the Amazon forest system could actually happen within the twenty-first century.” (Source: Bernardo M. Flores, et al, “Critical Transitions in the Amazon Forest System”, Nature, February 14, 2024).
It may seem absurd to consider collapse of the Amazon rainforest (65-million-years-old) which seems impossible, too far out, not warranting an article like this, but, sorry to say. it is already happening in early stages, as explained herein in some detail, with facts.
In fact, peer-reviewed studies of ecosystems such as …
A Review of Fire in the Straw: Notes on Inventing a Life by Nick Lyons
by Edward Curtin / May 24th, 2024
With lilacs in the dooryard blooming a week ago, I was struck by a sense of synchronicity so strong that I stood stone still and sniffed the air for its direction. I had just written a little essay about my youthful days and the first fish I caught at the age of ten and my subsequent basketball obsession. Now I was out for an early morning walk up the hill by the lake above the town across from the railroad tracks. As I dawdled in the intoxicating fragrance of the lilacs, it transported me to other springs when my blood …
Although Donald Trump, as president, proclaimed in his 2020 State of the Union address that he had produced a “blue-collar boom” in workers’ wages, the reality was quite different. Using his control of the executive branch of the U.S. government, Trump repeatedly undermined the wages of American workers by blocking raises and imposing wage reductions.
Only the preceding year, Trump derailed vital wage legislation. In July 2019―with the pathetically low federal minimum wage stuck at $7.25 per hour for a decade and some 13 million workers holding two or more jobs to support their families―the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives …
