In the weeks leading up to the recent presidential inauguration in Washington, this country and an anxious world expected many different things from what might be called, to borrow the title of a famed William Butler Yeats’s poem, “The Second Coming” of Donald J. Trump. But nobody expected this. Nobody at all. “We will restore… Read More Alfred McCoy: Slouching Towards Mount McKinley
The opening weeks of the second Trump administration have produced daily headlines that read — no, this is not hyperbole! — like science fiction. The spectacle of a South African tech billionaire and his cronies staging a twenty-first-century cybercoup with the acquiescence of an aging lunatic of a president beggars belief. Elon Musk has given… Read More Juan Cole: Cyberpunk Nation
Angry, rude and addicted to web troll-ery, the vice-president has the Make America Awful Again portfolio. Seems a perfect fit Marina Hyde You may well be aware that Backpfeifengesicht is the German word for a face that is worthy of being slapped. Even so, how has this not been internationalised? Or at the very least Americanised, where… Read More There are 1,000 grotesque memes of J. D. Vance: they’re all more likable than the real thing
NB: Whereas I agree with Professor Mehta’s arguments about the sinister significance of Trump’s treatment of President Zelenskyy; the following is where I disagree. He says the Russian invasion of Ukraine was only the second time since World War II that one country had claimed an entire other country… It was a war to erase… Read More The Mask is Off. After Ukraine, imperialism is now the norm
The Last Generation of Black Americans Under Jim Crow and the Culture of Racism in America By Douglas H. White Today, racism remains a poisonous force in America. Fascism and authoritarianism are on the rise and President Donald Trump is giving voice to such hate, making it state policy and central to his presidential agenda. Recently,… Read More Surviving Hard Times
NB: Brilliant satire. Lets have some more of it in our country. Resurrect Harishankar Parsai why do you look like you just felt the ghosts of administrations past seep into your spine?… A lot of important men have sat here… Left their mark. Some history remembers. Some history stays in the fabric. Source: Fearandloathing The… Read More Fear and Loathing: Closer to the Edge
NB: A very useful appraisal. The sentence “I believe that during the unipolar moment, we were deeply committed to spreading democracy”, is jarring however. American foreign policy has never been committed to democracy but to its strategic interests of global dominance. It would announce its grand intentions only in so far as the ideology (as… Read More The USA’s role in the Ukraine crisis (2022)
Costs of War Project at Brown University indicated that the “war on terror” persisted on several continents. “The war continues in over 80 countries,” said Catherine Lutz, the project’s co-director. The war’s cost to taxpayers, the project estimated, was already at least $8 trillion…. Supplementing the automatic $3.8 billion in annual U.S. military aid to Israel, special new… Read More Norman Solomon: How the Warfare State Paved the Way for a Trumpist Autocracy
I want to share my understanding of the events that have befallen Europe, and I’ll include not only the Ukraine crisis, but also Serbia 1999, the wars in the Middle East, including Iraq, Syria, the wars in Africa, including Sudan, Somalia, Libya. These are to a very significant extent the result of deeply misguided US… Read More The Geopolitics of Peace: Jeffrey Sachs in the European Parliament
This is what Israel is doing now, just to be clear. A Nakba. Gideon Levy Something is happening for the first time in Israeli history. One war has yet to fully die down, but Israel is already stoking the next one. We have been denied the luxury of a moment to breathe or a bit… Read More When the Third Intifada Breaks Out, Don’t Forget That Israel Instigated It
After the truth-shower 