William Astore I still remember how, soon after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush boasted that this country had “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.” I also remember how, in a pep talk given to U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2010, President Barack Obama declared them “the finest fighting force that the world has… Read More Perpetual wars and the ‘greatest fighting force in human history’
John Bartlett in Santiago Days before Salvador Allende’s confirmation as Chile’s president in 1970, US President Richard Nixon met with a rightwing Chilean media mogul to discuss blocking the socialist leader’s path to the presidency, newly declassified documents have revealed. The documents, published in a new Spanish edition of the Pinochet files by archivist and writer Peter Kornbluh, include… Read More Files reveal Nixon’s role in plot to block Allende from Chilean presidency
France has retained a quasi-empire in Africa by stealth, and it is under threat like never before. Nabila Ramdani Retreats from crumbling empires are inevitably characterised by hastily arranged evacuations. Panicked civilians make their way to rickety airport terminals, in the hope of an emergency flight out of the chaos. This was the postcolonial scene… Read More The Niger crisis shows France’s quasi-empire in Africa is finally crumbling
NB: Meanwhile the JNU History Centre collection, one of the most valuable in the country, is being dismantled by the authorities to make room for a new centre of Tamil studies. I am sure lovers of Tamil language and culture do not wish for the university’s history collection to be removed. This is nothing but… Read More Sri Lanka, thirty one years after: Burning of the Jaffna Public Library, May 1981
First posted August 06, 2019 NB: An insightful essay. In the ideas contained in Weber’s inaugural lecture on his appointment to the chair in political economy at Freiburg (1895) he comes across as an economic nationalist in favour of colonial expansion; and the closure of Germany’s eastern border to ‘cheap’ Polish labour migrants. He also used… Read More Pratap Bhanu Mehta: Reading 1919 in 2019
PRAVEEN SWAMI Erased from our memory by high-rise buildings and malls, Gurugram, and the Mewat region that sprawled to its south, imploded into a macabre carnival of killing during Partition. “Whole villages were razed; scores of mosques desecrated; thousands killed or forced on pain of death to convert to Hinduism”, historian Ian Copland writes, “and many… Read More Gurugram’s is a hard-won economic gain. But Nuh violence shows it’s imploding
By NORMAN SOLOMON In 1980, when I asked the press office at the U.S. Department of Energy to send me a listing of nuclear bomb test explosions, the agency mailed me an official booklet with the title “Announced United States Nuclear Tests, July 1945 Through December 1979.” As you’d expect, the Trinity test in New Mexico… Read More Were the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings “nuclear tests”? The U.S. government said so
First posted September 09, 2014 America has over 4,800 nuclear weapons, and we don’t take terrific care of them. It’s terrifying. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1ya-yF35g See also: Maybe there is a God after all: US Air Force nearly detonated atomic bomb over North Carolina in 1961 Noam Chomsky – How Many Minutes to … Hiroshima Day 2014. If some extraterrestrial species… Read More Funny and very scary: John Oliver on Nuclear Weapons
Japan has marked the 78th anniversary of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima where the mayor urged the abolition of nuclear weapons and called the G7 leaders’ notion of nuclear deterrence a “folly”. On Sunday a peace bell tolled at 8.15am, the time the bomb was dropped. About 50,000 participants in the outdoor memorial ceremony… Read More On 78th anniversary of atomic bomb, Hiroshima mayor says nuclear deterrence ‘folly’
the early U.S. was a settlers’ empire, a political and military force with the main goal to provide farm families (and speculators) with more land. So it went for generations. Jason Opal The indictment of former United States president Donald Trump on charges he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election is the most… Read More America is on the brink of another civil war, this one fuelled by Donald Trump / Trump has lost control of his own image
