“They operate in six of the seven continents. The only continent they don’t operate in is Antarctica because penguins don’t have money to buy drugs,” At least 29 people killed in Culiacán as drug cartel gunmen fight bloody battle to stop transport of El Chapo’s son after arrest Revealed: how Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel has created… Read More Twenty-four hours of terror as cartel violence engulfs Mexican city
J.J. Charlesworth Capitalism is making us mentally ill because we’ve all accepted its new message – that our freedom can be found in our constant self-realisation, which turns out to be our never- ending self-exploitation. That’s the driving message of Byung-Chul Han’s newly translated extended essay (it’s 130 pages long), but its bleak diagnosis of… Read More Topology of Violence, by Byung-Chul Han
Trent Zimmerman As we farewell 2022, many of the world’s citizens will be hoping for a better new year. It is hard to look back on the past year – indeed couple of years – without a high degree of angst about the direction of our global community. We have been battered by a pandemic… Read More I find hope in people who show the best of humanity
First posted January 13, 2013 NB: These extracts are from the Book within a Book in Chapter 9 of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four; first published in 1949. Sixty fours years later, the dystopian vision contained in the book throws light on the contemporary world, its fascination with war, violence and the fanatical ideologies that justify a continuous system of thought… Read More Ignorance is Strength; Freedom is Slavery; War is Peace
Letter to the Readers, Mainstream, Dec 24 & Dec 31, 2022 Indian Economy & Banking Under the Sway of Global Capital | Arun Kumar Not Rooted in Public Culture, Hindutva is a Lone Militant | Radhakanta Barik Spread of 2020-21 Farmers Agitation in Haryana | Jaglan & Rajeshwari Bharat Jod Yatra is Evocative of the Spirit of Dandi… Read More Mainstream Double issue, December 31 2022
The Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko recalls a quote attributed to Otto von Bismarck: “Wars are not won by generals, but by schoolteachers and parish priests.” It’s a country’s taught collective memory, its shared sense of its own history, that are the decisive instruments for mobilisation, and are as important on the battlefield as weaponry. Few… Read More The revenge of history in Ukraine: year of war has shaken up world order
NB: Men and women of conscience, such as the author of this meditation on the dangerous course that his own country is taking; belong to what Israel itself names the righteous among the nations. They will no doubt be denounced as ‘anti-national’; but we need people like this all over the globe. Let us heed… Read More Israel’s political and constitutional crisis
The PR firm advising the UN on climate change campaigns has been accused by US lawmakers of helping BP “greenwash” its fossil fuel investments, openDemocracy can reveal. Internal BP documents released to the US House of Representatives Oversight and Reform Committee and published last week show Brunswick created a strategy in 2017 or 2018 to help “reframe… Read More Secret files reveal how UN climate advisers ‘greenwashed’ for BP
By Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn / CounterPunch All through the 1980s and 1990s, professorial mountebanks like James Q. Wilson and Charles Murray grew plump from best sellers about the criminal, probably innate, propensities of the “underclass,” about the pathology of poverty, the teen predators, the collapse of morals, the irresponsibility of teen moms. There… Read More Neoliberalism and Its Discontents
Jonathan Watts For anyone who cares about the Amazon rainforest, there will be an extra reason to celebrate the new year countdown in Brazil on 31 December because the first stroke of midnight will mark the last moment in power of Jair Bolsonaro. The defeat of the ultra-right former army captain, who unleashed a wave of… Read More Seven reasons to be cheerful about the Amazon in 2023 – and three to be terrified
