Latest articles
by subMedia / April 9th, 2024
In anarchist history, 8 April 1877, a group of anarchists including a young Errico Malatesta marched into the small village of Letino. Chaos ensued as they looted the town safe and burned the village tax documents and property deeds in the streets.
It was one of the earliest examples of a new anarchist strategy: “Propaganda by the Deed.”
by Abahlali baseMjondolo / April 9th, 2024
Beginning at the General Assembly held in Durban on the first Sunday in February Abahlali baseMjondolo has held an extensive process of meetings and discussions at all levels of our movement, and in all our 87 branches in good standing across the four provinces where we have members, to develop a collective strategy for the election to be held on 29 May 2024. The Youth League and Women’s League also held their own discussions. The discussions in our monthly General Assemblies have all been open to the public and have been attended by representatives from a number of other organisations. …
by Paul Larudee / April 8th, 2024
Years ago, I made the statement that Palestinians had not sacrificed enough. It was meant to be a shocking statement, but it wasn’t a judgmental one. What I meant was that all of the terrible sacrifices that Palestinians had made up until that time had failed to liberate Palestine, and that we would know when adequate sacrifice had been made by the standard of whether liberation had been achieved.
I believe that we are reaching a vantage point where this accomplishment is now within view, or at least just over the horizon. If so, it is utterly astonishing, but the greatest …
by Rick Sterling / April 8th, 2024
In June 1967 Israel launched surprise attacks on its Arab neighbors and captured Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Golan. With military and intelligence support from Lyndon Johnson’s administration, Israel shocked and overwhelmed its neighbors, largely destroying Egypt’s air force on the ground. Israel not only seized possession of these territories, they humiliated their adversaries. It only took six days.
This assault was pivotal in three respects. First, it cemented hard core Zionism including unrepentant violence at the core of the country. This is shown not only by the atrocities committed against their Arab neighbors. It is shown in the …
by Don Fitz / April 8th, 2024
A friend recently told me of a new study showing that the “life cycle” of electric vehicles (EVs) causes fewer CO2 emissions than gas-powered cars. This is important since research comparing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per mile have left out the enormous emissions associated with the complex mining, manufacturing and disposal phases of EVs. Is this recent announcement just more corporate bunk? Or, could it mean that EVs are truly a step toward a greener world?
And, is there a transportation alternative that avoids the pitfalls of both EVs and gas cars?
The article by Julian Spector and Dan McCarthy …
by Binoy Kampmark / April 8th, 2024
Can it get any busier? The World Court, otherwise known as the International Court of Justice, has been swamped by applications on the subject of alleged genocide. The site of interest remains the Gaza Strip, the subject of unremitting slaughter since the October 7, 2023 cross-border attacks by Hamas against Israel. The retaliation by Israel has been of such brute savagery as to draw the attention of numerous states, including those not directly connected to the conflict.
Given that genocide is a crime of universal jurisdiction abominated by international law, and given the broad application of the UN Genocide Convention intended …
No matter who wins the public loses
by Dan Lieberman / April 8th, 2024
The American public awaits the coming presidential election…. with trepidation. Democrat assertion that the Republicans colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election on the side of Donald Trump and Republican assertion that the Democrats stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump remain bitter memories for the two political Parties. Both assertions are illusions, easily proven false, and still have growling followers.
The fabricated illusions that muddled the past elections remain; Trump constructs illusion as his principal political tool and Biden proceeds with perpetrated illusions that he is in total command and apartheid Israel is worth defending. Include presidential hopeful …
“War Tax Resisters” Protest with Their Money
by National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee / April 8th, 2024
War tax resisters are taking to the streets to call for an end to genocide and endless war. They are divesting from the taxes that fund war and investing in people, planet, and justice.
The US supports Israel with over $3 billion in military aid each year and has provided more military aid to Israel than any other country since the end of World War II. Since the beginning of 2022, the US has dedicated over $46 billion of military aid for war in Ukraine. Most of these funds will be used by the Department of Defense to replenish the military …
The facility was targeted by multiple kamikaze drones, Russia’s nuclear energy agency Rosatom has said
by RT / April 8th, 2024
And will they ever be brave enough to brand Israel a terrorist regime?
by Stuart Littlewood / April 8th, 2024
You’d think Western leaders dealing with foreign affairs would make sure they had a working knowledge of international law and a healthy respect for its importance. It’s based on common sense and is easy enough for politicians of average intelligence to understand. But they don’t seem to.
So it was refreshing to hear Vasily Nebenzya, Russia’s representative at the United Nations, ticking off the US and Israel for trying to duck their legal responsibilities after the Security Council adopted Resolution 2728. This deals with Israel’s attempt to destroy Gaza and its people and “demands an immediate ceasefire …
On the Fall of the Francis Scott Key Bridge
by Ellen Brown / April 7th, 2024
The Baltimore bridge that collapsed on March 26th was named for Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics to the American national anthem “The Star-Spangled Banner” in 1814. His inspiration was the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in the critical port of Baltimore during the War of 1812. The British had just burned the U.S. Capitol and the White House and had set their sights on the Baltimore port, with the guns from hundreds of British ships trained on shelling the American flag. If the flag were taken down, they would know the Americans had surrendered, and the British agreed the shelling would …
by Binoy Kampmark / April 6th, 2024
The occasional burst of candour from US diplomats provides a striking, air clearing difference to their Australian and British counterparts. Official statements about the AUKUS security pact between Washington, London and Canberra, rarely mention the target in so many words, except on the gossiping fringes. Commentators and think tankers are essentially given free rein to speculate, masticating over such streaky and light terms as “new strategic environment”, “great power competition”, “rules-based order”.
On the occasion of his April 3 visit to Washington’s Center for a New American Security (CNAS), US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell was refreshingly frank. His …
Sacred Psychology in Western History
by Bruce Lerro / April 6th, 2024
Orientation
How I came across Life Force: The Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self
In the middle of the 1980s I had decided to return to college to get a degree in counseling psychology. I was sitting in a café in the North Beach area …
by Dissident Voice Communications / April 6th, 2024
by T.P. Wilkinson / April 6th, 2024
Many years ago, in the previous century, an old controversy in the Latin Church was resuscitated, that of Christian poverty. Anyone who pursues the history of the Latin Church and the papal empire will find periodic disputes over the meaning of such dicta as “the poor shall inherit the Earth” or innumerable other citations attributed to the biblical Jesus of Nazareth. At the apex of its power the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition included those who insisted that poverty was a fundamental principle of Christian life (meaning for all the clergy, …
The contribution of nuclear power to electricity generation is the lowest for thirty years and its price twice that of renewables.
by Jean-François Julliard / April 6th, 2024
It crackles like a Geiger counter in a uranium mine: in 2023, Emmanuel Macron announced plans for six additional EPR [European Pressurized Reactor] nuclear power plants. Hang on, no, perhaps fourteen in the long term.
In reviving nuclear in the name of the struggle against global warming, the European Union has followed suit. Japan is promising new developments on the nuclear front. The US is experimenting with miniature reactors. China is building with gusto … All these ‘ionizing’ projects seem to indicate that fission-based nuclear power is in full swing.
In fact, it is to the contrary. A report of experts published …
by Edward Curtin / April 5th, 2024
“I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air”
— Lord Byron, “Darkness”, 1816
Overheard in a coffee shop: A woman and a man are sitting together at a table. She with a laptop open before her and he with a coffee and a book. Looking at the screen, she says to him, “I didn’t know that the solar eclipse lasts for 70 to 80 minutes, …
by Robert Hunziker / April 5th, 2024
The World Meteorological Organization (Geneva, Switzerland) State of Climate 2023 Report by Celste Saulo, secretary general, was issued on March 19th, 2024.
“As secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization, I am now sounding the Red Alert about the state of the climate.”
The WMO has issued an annual State of the Climate Report for more than 30 years. Accordingly, Dr. Celste Saulo’s release of the Flagship Report: “The year 2023 set new records for every single climate indicator. This annual report shows that the climate crisis is the defining challenge that humanity faces, closely intertwined with the inequality crisis as witnessed …
by Media Lens / April 5th, 2024
A key function of the state-corporate media is to deny reality. They do supply news. But it is no accident that they supply news of a type that covers up the crimes of elite power.
However, the appalling violence and destruction being inflicted in Gaza by Israel are simply too great to conceal. We may well be living through an unprecedented era where the vast crimes of the West, and the complicity of major news organisations, have never been more exposed to the public.
Professor Jeffrey Sachs, the US economist and Director of …
by C.J. Hopkins / April 4th, 2024
One of the first things totalitarians do when they set about transforming a democratic society into whatever type of strictly-regulated, utterly soul-deadening totalitarian dystopia they are trying to transform it into is radically overhaul and remake its culture. You can’t impose your new official ideology on a formerly democratic society with a bunch of artists running around loose, making fun of you and your propaganda. No, you need to get the culture business under control, and dictate what is and isn’t “art,” and what types of art are “harmful to society,” …
by Alfred de Zayas and John Perry / April 4th, 2024
When the United Nations sets up a “commission of inquiry,” it can result in a powerful analysis of violations of human rights law, such as the one appointed in 2021 to examine Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories and its Apartheid practices. But other commissions can become political platforms aimed at demonizing a particular government by crafting narratives that give the semblance of objectivity, while suppressing all evidence that contradicts the prevailing geopolitical consensus. The ultimate aim of such commissions is not to investigate or to provide advice or technical assistance, but to support a campaign of destabilization. They make …
by Binoy Kampmark / April 4th, 2024
The Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, was distraught and testy. It seemed that, on this occasion, Israel had gone too far. Not too far in killing over 32,000 Palestinians in Gaza, a staggering percentage of them being children. Not too far in terms of using starvation as a weapon of war. Not too far in bringing attention to the International Court of Justice that its actions are potentially genocidal.
Israel had overstepped in doing something it has done previously to other nationals: kill humanitarian workers in targeted strikes. The difference for Albanese on this occasion was that one of the individuals …
by Vijay Prashad / April 4th, 2024
Diego Rivera (Mexico), El Agua, Origen de la Vida (‘Water, Origin of Life’), 1951.
By November 2023, it was already clear that the Israeli government had begun to deny Palestinians in Gaza access to water. ‘Every hour that passes with Israel preventing the provision of safe drinking water in the Gaza strip, in brazen breach of international law, puts Gazans at risk of dying of thirst and diseases related to the lack of safe drinking water’, said Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, UN special rapporteur on the human rights to …
by T.P. Wilkinson / April 4th, 2024
The importance of “peace” in the rhetoric of the West lies not in the sincerity with which it is preached. Rather “peace”, like the DIE dogma emerging from the recent Awakening Crusade (Wokism) is a term of invidious distraction. The intensity and frequency of its use is determined by the underlying concept of domination. As opposed to actual peace, i.e. the absence of hostilities, “peace” is a political and psychological warfare device deployed for what could be called “terminological” or “linguistic” denial.
Just as the US Forces, operating behind the United Nations …
by Michael K. Smith / April 4th, 2024
April 3, 1968 – Memphis
In town to help striking Memphis garbage workers, an exhausted and downcast Dr. King is already in his pajamas when the call comes in from Reverend Abernathy at Mason Temple, informing him that two thousand people have braved tornado warnings and a driving rain to hear him speak. “I really think you should come down,” Abernathy pleads. “The people want to hear you, not me. This is your crowd.”
Dr. King gets dressed and goes out into the stormy night.
In the blaze of lights at the podium he appears nervous. He tells his audience that if …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / April 3rd, 2024
The government wants to play god.
It wants the power to decide who lives or dies and whose rights are worthy of protection.
Abortion may still be front and center in the power struggle between the Left and the Right over who has the right to decide—the government or the individual—when it comes to bodily autonomy, the right to privacy, sexual freedom, the rights of the unborn, and property interests in one’s body, but there’s so much more at play.
In the 50-plus years since the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling in Roe v. Wade, the government has come to …
by Gerald E. Scorse / April 3rd, 2024
Prices for prescription drugs in America average almost three times as much as in other major nations around the world. Even more, the companies that set those prices are doing everything they can to make sure they stay in the stratosphere: they filed suit to overturn an upcoming reform, having Medicare negotiate the prices of some of the costliest and most commonly used drugs. While the suit has already been dismissed, other challenges are certain to follow.
The makers don’t think they need to explain themselves, either. If they hadn’t been threatened with subpoenas, …
by Binoy Kampmark / April 3rd, 2024
Eulogies should rarely be taken at face value. Plaster saints take the place of complex individuals; faults transmute into golden virtues. But there was little in the way of fault regarding Lalzawmi “Zomi” Frankcom’s messianic purpose, whose tireless work for the charity, World Central Kitchen (WCK) in northern Gaza had not gone unnoticed. Sadly, the Australian national, along with six other members of WCK, were noticed by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) around midnight of April 1 and 2 and targeted in a strike that killed all of them.
Other members of the slain crew included Polish citizen Damian Sobol, three …
by William Manson / April 2nd, 2024
In early 6th century Athens (BCE), it was all the rage. Introduced by Thespis, play-acting quickly attained widespread popularity among the Athenians who, like most people, were looking for diverting forms of entertainment to fill the evening hours. On one such evening the aged patriarch Solon, celebrated lawmaker and civic founder, was persuaded to attend a performance. His reaction: indignation and an angry rebuke to Thespis, who blithely responded that such “play” was harmless, merely a novel pastime. “No!” Solon angrily retorted (here freely paraphrasing Plutarch’s account), “It is dangerous. Such …
A “Loyal Little Ulster”
by Kieran Kelly / April 2nd, 2024
Even though the land could not yet absorb sixteen million, nor even eight, enough could return… to prove that the enterprise was one that blessed him that gave as well as him that took by forming for England a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism.”
— Ronald Storrs, Military Governor of Jerusalem 1917-20, commenting in 1937 on the rationale of the 1917 Balfour Declaration
Zionism is the continual attempt to fit a square into a circle….
