There is tons of work to be done, and lots of people who would like to do the work. It’s just that the economic system is such a grotesque catastrophe that it can’t even put together idle hands and needed work, which would be satisfying to the people and which would be beneficial to all of us. That’s just the mark of a failed system. The most dramatic mark of it.
In Greece, British troops entered after the Nazis had withdrawn. They imposed a corrupt regime that evoked renewed resistance, and Britain, in its postwar decline, was unable to maintain control. In 1947, the United States moved in, supporting a murderous war that resulted in about 160,000 deaths.
There’s no point in reading a book if you let it pass before your eyes and then forget about it ten minutes later. Reading a book is an intellectual exercise, which stimulates thought, questions, imagination.
In reality, a few years later a North–South compact permitted the slaveholding states to reinstitute a form of slavery by effectively criminalizing black life, providing a cheap and disciplined labor force for much of the industrial revolution, a system that persisted until World War II created the need for free labor. The ugly history is being reenacted under the vicious “drug war” of the past generation, since Ronald Reagan.
Well, a good place to start if you want to know what something was about is to look to see what changes it introduced. And particularly in the case of a war planned in advance where the outcome was never in any doubt, I think you have solid reason to believe the result was what the thing was really for in the first place.
It is useful to remember that no matter where we turn, there is rarely any shortage of elevated ideals to accompany the resort to violence.
Defenseless peasant societies in Laos and Cambodia were savagely bombed in “secret” – the “secrecy” resulting from the refusal of the mass media to make public facts for which they had ample evidence.
The choice is ours, the choice is yours.
Of the approximately nine hundred thousand Palestinians living in the territories designated by the UN as a Jewish state, only one hundred thousand remained on or near their lands and homes. Those who remained became the Palestinian minority in Israel. The rest were expelled, or fled under the threat of expulsion, and a few thousand died in massacres.
Though they have been subjected to disgraceful treatment, the Palestinians in East Jerusalem are fortunate in comparison with those who are less visible, and therefore can be killed, tortured, humiliated, and driven from their destroyed homes and lands virtually at will. It is, in fact, astonishing that their spirit has not been broken.
NATO bombing of Serbia was undertaken by the ‘international community,’ according to consistent Western rhetoric – although those who did not have their heads buried in the sand knew that it was opposed by most of the world, often quite vocally. Those who do not support the actions of wealth and power are not part of ’the global community.
The United States can be held to lead the international community only if that community is defined as the United States and whoever happens to go along with it, often through intimidation, as is sometimes tacitly conceded. Critics.
Neoliberalism is the defining political economic paradigm of our time – it refers to the policies and processes whereby a relative handful of private interests are permitted to control as much as possible of social life in order to maximize their personal profit.
Classical liberalism was wrecked on the shoals of capitalism, but.
On almost all issues, citizens could not identify the stands of the candidates – as intended.
Unfortunately, you can’t vote the rascals out, because you never voted them in, in the first place. The corporate executives and the corporation lawyers and so on who overwhelmingly staff the executive, assisted increasingly by a university based mandarin class, remain in power no matter whom you elect.
It’s very important for institutions of concentrated power to keep people alone and isolated: that way they’re ineffective, they can’t defend themselves against indoctrination, they can’t even figure out what they think.
Candor is entirely in order: only the most devilish anti-American, after all, could question our right to act as suits our fancy. If, say, we choose to invade some defenseless country to capture one of our agents who no longer follows orders, and then try him for crimes committed while on our payroll, who could question the majesty of our system of justice? True, the UN did, but our veto took care of that childish tantrum.
Aggression is “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.
The powerful are self-immunized from even inquiry, let alone punishment for their crimes.