Both Perestroika and Thatcherism, then, meant scaling back economic and social security to drive efficiency gains and shift labor and capital from declining to rising industries. If this similarity between East and West is unsettling to readers today, it is nonetheless one that, as Bartel’s archival work demonstrates, was recognized behind closed doors at the… Read More No Alternative?
Levine describes the early concept of the internet as “an operating system for the American empire, an information system that could collect all this data and that could provide useful, meaningful information to the managers of the world.” Yasha Levine / The Chris Hedges Report The internet, from its inception, was created to be a… Read More The Secret Military History of the Internet
It was never about eliminating antisemitism. It was always about silencing Palestine By Patrick Lawrence / Consortium News Some people worth citing this week. They speak of different matters, but when we put all their apples and oranges into a basket we discover they belong together, their bright colors confronting us with a challenge: It is… Read More American Freefall
NB: The lecherous drunkard Hegseth recently said ‘Zionism & Americanism are the front lines of Western civilisation and freedom in our world today.‘ If that is so, both are doomed, and will take ‘western civilisation’ crashing down with them. Israel and the USA now stand forth as the greatest danger to humanity; led by pathological… Read More Top 5 Ways Netanyahu kept Hamas in Power
Dr Ramzy Baroud Explaining Arab political failure to challenge Israel through traditional analysis—such as disunity, general weakness, and a failure to prioritize Palestine—does not capture the full picture. The idea that Israel is brutalizing Palestinians simply because the Arabs are too weak to challenge the Benjamin Netanyahu government—or any government—implies that, in theory, Arab regimes… Read More Arab Failures: The Unspoken Complicity in Israel’s Genocide
Kenan Malik ‘Gold, mister, is worth what it is because of the human labor that goes into the finding and getting of it.” It’s a line spoken by Walter Huston in the 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a story about greed and moral corruption directed by his son, John Huston. That line was to have… Read More Just like McCarthy, Trump spreads fear everywhere before picking off his targets
Yet Orwell has shaped his life. “My father was devoted to me,” he says. “Absolutely devoted.” And Blair is equally devoted to him. He regards himself as the keeper of the sacred flame for his father. ‘My father was devoted to me’ … Blair with Orwell. Photograph: Vernon Richards Richard Blair didn’t have the easiest start in life. At three… Read More George Orwell and me: Richard Blair on life with his extraordinary father
Situationist International and the Students of Strasbourg November 1966 On the Poverty of Student Life: The Little Pamphlet that Started a Revolution The Situationist International (SI) was founded in 1957 by a half-dozen European avant-garde artists. Recent historical events, chiefly workers uprisings in East Germany, Poland and Hungary, convinced them that a social revolution was… Read More On the Poverty of Student Life Considered in its Economic, Political, Psychological, Sexual, and Especially Intellectual Aspects, with a Modest Proposal for Doing Away With It (Strasbourg, 1966)
Are we in that moment, in the belly of a bubble that has burst and taken ‘liberal democracy’ along, kicking and screaming, or perhaps not? Are we living the Hobbesian description? One of the ennobling gifts of literature is the light it shines on our essential condition beyond the frontiers of time or context or… Read More Sankarshan Thakur: Bubble democracy
Jonathan Steele For a man who once told his friend Beatrice Webb that he “disliked the profession of diplomacy”, Ivan Maisky was an unusually brilliant practitioner of the art of being an ambassador. Spending 11 years as Stalin’s representative in London, between 1932 and 1943, Maisky not only had his hands full in trying to… Read More The Maisky Diaries review – Britain’s high and mighty in conversation with Stalin’s man
