We’re hearing a lot about U.S. veterans being deported, just as we hear about healthcare and retirement and homelessness and countless other topics as impacting veterans in particular. The implication, and often the explicit assertion, is that we should especially care about injustice when it hurts veterans, because they’ve especially earned the right to be treated decently, by participating in the greatest mass-murdering crime sprees of recent decades — the wars that most of us (and may
Who Calls Anyone “Civilized?” – Cathy Breen
Photo: Building in Mosul decimated by bombing, March 2018. Abu Mohammed.
March 31, 2018
Naomi Shihab Nye is a poet and professor of Creative Writing at Texas State. Her father was Palestinian and a refugee journalist. In one of her poems after 9/11, entitled “Blood,” she writes:
I call my father, we talk around the news.
It is too much for him,
neither of his two languages can reach it.
I drive into the country to find sheep, cows,
to plead
A crazy thought: Is Trump Going Off the Rails or Possibly Getting Back on Track?
By Dave Lindorff
Here’s a bizarre contrarian thought — one admittedly based on limited and dubious evidence and that flies in the face of a more than a year’s contrary evidence, and that is more along the lines of a desperate hope than reality, but what the hell. Bear with me:
Suppose for a moment that President Donald Trump, a narcissistic man of little intellect
Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Making Atrocities Great Again
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
There’s been a lot of free-floating fear and horror
Moving forward together to be a light for a broken world
We gain strength when we decide that we won’t allow the crimes of others to hold us back. We gain true freedom when we forgive our oppressors
Abstain to satisfy your hunger for peace and understanding
Fasting makes me feel purified in body, mind and spirit, and links me in solidarity with good people all around the world
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The White Ford Bronco Presidency
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Big Brother Isn’t Watching You
You’re Watching Him!
By Tom Engelhardt
A record? Come on! Don’t minimize what’s happening. It’s far too unique, too unprecedented even to be classified as “historic.” Call it mega-historic, if you wish. Never from Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar to Soviet despot Joseph Stalin, from the Sun King Louis the XIV to President Ronald Reagan,
Thinking Beyond Exceptionalism
Excepted from Curing Exceptionalism: What’s wrong with how we think about the United States? What can we do about it? (April, 2018).
Try this experiment: Imagine that space aliens really come to earth and really have, as I think is very unlikely, developed the ability to travel to earth while simultaneously remaining so primitive as to violently attack the places they visit. In contrast to the space aliens, could you identify as an earthling to such an extent as to diminish your other senses of identity? “Earthlings — F— Yeah!” “We’re Number 1!” “Greatest Earthlings on Earth!” And can you hold that thought,
Talk Nation Radio: Mitchell Plitnick on John Bolton
Mitchell Plitnick is former vice president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace. He is the former director of the U.S. Office of B’Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, and was previously the director of education and policy for Jewish Voice for Peace. He’s published an article called “John Bolton: The Essential Profile.” See:
https://lobelog.com/john-bolton-the-essential-profile
Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
U.S. at peace? Some Americans think so
The U.S. Senate voted down, 55 to 44, a bill co-sponsored by Bernie Sanders that would have ended U.S. involvement in the Saudi Arabia-led war against Yemen. However, veteran anti-war activist David Swanson saw the action as a sign of progress, given that the Senate has never conducted such a vote based on the War Powers Act. Swanson, publisher of the influential web site WarIsACrime.org and director of World Beyond War, has found that Americans “around the country think that