Putin's Praetorians: Confessions of the Top Kremlin Trolls Phil Butler
Ego vs. Soul in Sports: Essays on Sport at Its Best and Worst 1524541516
The New Human Rights Movement Peter Joseph
Practical Utopia: Strategies for a Desirable Society Michael Albert
The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World Douglas Valentine
The Structural-Anarchism Manifesto Michel Luc Bellemare
Voices for Peace: War, Resistance, and America’s Quest for Full-spectrum Dominance T.J. Coles (Ed)
In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power Alfred W. MCCoy
Washington's Long War on Syria Stephen Gowans
Requiem for the American Dream Noam Chomsky
“Shape without form, shade without colour. Paralysed force, gesture without motion.”
Every artist, every scientist, must decide now where he stands. He has no alternative. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights. There are no impartial observers. Through the destruction, in certain countries, of the greatest of man’s literary heritage, through the propagation of false ideas of racial and national superiority, the artist, the scientist, the writer is challenged. The struggle invades the formerly cloistered halls of our universities and other seats of learning. The battlefront is everywhere. There is no sheltered rear.
— Paul Robeson, Here I Stand, p. 52.
The struggle for us common folk daily is a battle …
The US Congress has withdrawn RT America’s accreditation on Capitol Hill, citing the company’s “foreign agent” status. That’s hours after the State Department said the US Foreign Agents Registration Act “does not restrict an organization’s ability to operate.” Read more.
Interview with Daniel Kovalik
Paramilitaries on the Columbia Venezuela border
Murders of trade unionists and social leaders, paramilitary activity, coca production… If we only paid attention to the mainstream media we would not get the idea that these problems are actually growing in Colombia, one year after the peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC came into place. To get a better picture and understand how all these elements connect to US policy and corporate interests, we interviewed Daniel Kovalik, a lawyer and human rights activist who has long been …
The sports pages of major newspapers, such as the Washington Post,are thriving while other sections of newspapers such as business sections or book review pages struggle to survive.
That doesn’t mean that the sports pages allow the fans, the consumers, the taxpayers and many of the players have their say. Over the years, the sports sections have been neglecting the dark sides of organized sports as a deliberate practice, not as an oversight.
Ken Reed, author of several books, weekly columns, and the Sports Policy Director for our …
I Am. You Should Be, Too
“Quit resisting.”—Cops yell at compliant young man who was thrown to the ground, beaten, arrested and hospitalized for severe injuries to his face and arm, allegedly in retaliation for “resisting arrest” by driving to a safe, well-lit area before submitting to a traffic stop for a broken tail light
We’ve all been there before.
You’re driving along and you see a pair of flashing blue lights in your rearview mirror. Whether or not you’ve done anything wrong, you get a sinking feeling in your stomach.
You’ve read enough news stories, seen enough headlines, and lived in the American police state long enough …
Let’s just start of with the base assumption that “violence is bad.” This is a truism, of course, but in embracing what is a self-evident truth, we often loose sight of what violence means when discussing violence within the wider scope of human expression and political framings.
Now, let’s turn towards other serious questions tangential to violence that are nonetheless part of the political choreographies that frame violence from one society to the next. For instance, why does violence not “outbreak,” but rather is always enacted? How might violence be created by other violences? And how does the media often give …
She was just standing there, in the middle of burning land, surrounded by stumps of trees, fire everywhere, smoke rising towards a hopelessly gray sky. The expression on her face was mischievous, almost girlish. I had no idea how old she was: she could have been 28, just as she could easily have been 55.
This island, this village, this charred land: it all looked like hell to me, but obviously not to her: it actually made her laugh, burst with pride.
After all, it was her island, not mine; it was her land, her trees, and it was all getting royally …
To some on the geopolitical stage, “stability” is something like a sacred word.
Of course, the devil is in the details. For decades, the word was used by successive US governments in a sense which did not preclude a certain number of wars – as long as those wars, whether officially declared or merely approved by an American President under the terms of some special Congressional authorization such as the one which is behind most current US military activity, were begun and carried out on American terms.
“Stability” was and remains the justification employed in defending United States support for some truly …
We all do it. We say something, in the moment when said, sincerely, or perhaps just quasi-sincerely. But when what we’ve said demands action on our part, we flounder. Is this a folly of human interpersonal dialogue– a planned or accidental obsolescence of discourse? Or is it that we contract ourselves to our own voluntary intentions, only to be unable to fulfill our end of the agreement when a summons is made? Whether we can sense it or not, words can be very potent instruments of harm and not just the vehicles for salubrious creations like poetry, literature, and even …
We’ve all heard this story in one form or another. A person finally convinces themselves to go see their doctor for some innocuous but persistent problem. Their hope is for relief from a quick injection or a round of pharmaceuticals. Sadly, for our protagonist, it will not be that simple or easy. The seemingly benign symptoms mask a hidden carcinoma lying unseen in some forgotten region of their body, the mostly tranquil surface masking a concealed decay deep in the core that denies a healthy foundation.
It’s a sad story and for our purpose here, an analogy for a truly sad …
Israel is putting in place the final pieces of a Greater Jewish Jerusalem that will require “ethnically cleansing” tens of thousands of Palestinians from a city their families have lived and worked in for generations, human rights groups have warned.
The pace of physical and demographic changes in the city has accelerated dramatically since Israel began building a steel and concrete barrier through the city’s Palestinian neighbourhoods more than a decade ago, according to the rights groups and Palestinian researchers.
Israel is preparing to cement these changes in law, they note. Two parliamentary bills with widespread backing among government ministers indicate the …
Interview with John Halle
Noam ChomskyJohn Halle is the Director of Studies in Music Theory and Practice at Bard College. He joined the faculty of Bard after serving for seven years in the music department at Yale University. As an active composer and theorist, his scholarship focuses on connections between the mental representation of language and music. Halle is also known for his political writings and collaboration with Noam Chomsky. Along with Chomsky, he co-authored, An Eight Point Brief for LEV (Lesser Evil Voting), a widely …
It was another etching in a chronicle of extended violence. For days, resistance by refugees and asylum seekers against forced removal from the Lombrom Naval Base on Manus Island had taken very public form. Images of defiance and distress were receiving international attention. With no electricity, with water supplies destroyed, things were getting dire.
As the weekend dawned, PNG officials were claiming that the remaining 328 men from the base had been moved to new camps in Lorengau. To these can be added the 50 men or so forcibly removed a day prior. Journalists from the ABC noted the use of …
(A Structural-Anarchism Critique of Left/Right Accelerationism)
The post-modern project is not complete. The fundamental meta-narrative of capitalism continues to persist and bewitch a vast sum of humanity. If the post-modern condition is defined by “an incredulity towards meta-narratives”,, then, the meta-narrative of capitalism is the last great bastion of the Enlightenment and its two-faced ideal of human equality and civic emancipation. Indeed, the meta-narrative of capitalism, the crown-jewel of the Enlightenment, continues to prosper and enslave, both mentally and physically, the rational human spirit, with dreams of material …
(Part 2 of a 2-Part Series)
The impact of Fukushima Daiichi’s nuclear meltdown extends far and wide, as the hemispheric ecosystem gets hit by tons of radioactive water. Additionally, surreptitiousness surrounds untold death and illness, yet it remains one of the least understood and deceitfully reported episodes of journalism in modern history.
At the same time as Japan passed its totalitarian secrecy act in December 2013, it passed an obstructive Cancer Registration Law, which made it illegal to share medical data or information on radiation-related issues, denying public access to medical records, with violators subject to fines of two million Yen or 5-10 years in prison, a …
I confess to being troubled rather than elated by the daily rumble of idols falling to accusations of “sexual misconduct,” the morbid masscult fixation that conceals private titillation, knowing smirks, and sadistic lip-smacking behind a public mask of solemn reproof.
Weinstein and Trump and Roy Moore and Bill Clinton are vile pigs and creeps, no doubt; I have always detested the smug neoliberal performance-art strut of Al Franken and the careerist-toady journalism of Glenn Thrush and Charlie Rose, the latest dominoes to tumble amid the barrage of public accusations of “inappropriate” advances or touching.
But the boundary between cultural tolerance/intolerance …
For almost two decades, the US pursued a list of ‘enemy countries’ to confront, attack, weaken and overthrow. This imperial quest to overthrow ‘enemy countries’ operated at various levels of intensity, depending on two considerations: the level of priority and the degree of vulnerability for a ‘regime change’ operation.
The criteria for determining an ‘enemy country’ and its place on the list of priority targets in the US quest for greater global dominance, as well as …
(Amapondo Zinkomo is an expression for the early dawn in Sindebele, the language of the Matabele people of Zimbabwe, who were butchered in their tens of thousands in the early days of the Mugabe government. The words mean “the horns of the cattle”, and refer to that time in the early morning were the tips of cattle horns can first be made out against the lightening sky.)
Watching the TV images of jubilant scenes on the streets of Harare on the day Robert Mugabe resigned as president of Zimbabwe, one rather strange thing caught my eye. Not a single policeman was …
Systemic Injustice, Human Suffering
Born in Sudan, Asima fled violent conflict in her homeland and sought asylum in Britain. Poorly educated, unemployed and vulnerable, she relies on state benefits, which are conditional and inadequate, to survive.
At the beginning of October her father had a stroke. Thanks to the kindness of a friend who paid her airfare, Asima visited him in Ethiopia. Upon returning to London, she discovered her rent payments had been stopped by the local authority because she’d been abroad longer than the 28-day limit. In fact she was away 30 days, two days over the regulated time.
The effect of this decision is …
There is no image of prosperity which is not at the same time an image of crisis. I modify here Walter Benjamin’s famous dictum from Über den Begriff der Geschichte. For the current American context, we’ve advanced into a period where national prosperity is realized through social and cultural damage. That is to say, it is a context where tightened borders and criminalized immigration is accompanied by domestic instability and global unrest; where the expansion of global industry and capital …
