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Years of Living Deniably
The summer of discontent is upon us. Whether we will find ourselves witness to direct exchange of fire or targets of another global counter-insurgency sweep is anyone’s guess. This time in 2020 the most massive abrogation of human and civil rights (temporary privileges granted to selective populations at different levels) in recorded history was accelerating […]
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Timely Lessons About Tyranny from the Father of the Constitution
It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. — James Madison, A Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, 1785 James Madison, often referred to as the “Father of the Constitution,” once predicted that the Bill of Rights would become mere “parchment barrier,” words on paper ignored by successive generations of […]
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Israel is Dragging the World into Darkness
Israel must be held accountable for the suffering it is inflicting on Gaza (Omar Ashtawy APA images) Israel does not belong in the modern world. It is the child of European colonialism and Europe’s genocidal anti-Semitism, imposed by force and fire and Western guilt on a land already inhabited by an indigenous people. Israel is […]
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Britain’s Century Long Opium Trafficking and China’s Century of Humiliation (1839-1949)
For the Chinese, the trauma of the Century of Humiliation continues as a blunt reminder of their past defeat and neo-colonial servitude, as well as a reminder of the West’s self-righteous hypocrisy and arrogance. In 1500, India and China were the world’s most advanced civilizations. Then came the Europeans. They eventually looted and wreaked havoc […]
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Get Up, Stand Up, Don’t Give Up the Fight: Know Your Rights or You Will Lose Them
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. — Thomas Jefferson 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 […]
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If The Wars Go On
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 […]
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Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World
Iri and Toshi Maruki, XV Nagasaki, 1982, from The Hiroshima Panels. For Prabir, who is now out of jail. 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 […]
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Donald Trump’s Assault on the Wages of American Workers
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. […]
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Hell in a Very Small Place
Hell: the creditor of last resort Note: While I was writing this I thought about many things I experienced and read. Then as I was posting this the title of a book I read many years ago came to mind. Bernard Fall’s Hell in a Very Small Place. Fall was and remained a sympathizer with […]
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Gaza is our moment of truth
A protest by students at George Washington University. Probal Rashid SIPA USA) Powerful student movements in the 1960s and 1970s shook the world’s conscience to end America’s slaughter in Vietnam and Cambodia. The moral force of Black people rising together in their pain and rage against legislated racism changed the social fabric of America, ending […]
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