Displacing and destroying peoples by colonisation is not just a historical Western evil but a global and contemporary one Lachlan McNamee In 1931, Japan invaded northeast China and established a client state called Manchukuo (Manchuria). To secure control over Manchuria, over the next 14 years, the Japanese government lured 270,000 settlers there by offering free… Read More Settler colonialism
NB: This essay brings us closer to the irredeemable racism of the rulers of the ‘free world’; and their habit of transferring their guilt and responsibility for mass crimes onto the shoulders of others. Here is another argument, directed at thoughtful Israelis (the AV is at this link). It is made by someone who is… Read More Michael Brenner: Europe-Jews-Muslims
NB: The only people benefiting from this conflict are arms dealers. Western establishments make immense profits from warfare, and have an interest in eternal conflict. As Orwell said, war has been abolished by becoming permanent. DS Defence majors such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Gruman, Huntington Ingalls, L3Harris Tech and General Dynamics have gained at least… Read More Israel-Hamas War: US arms industry stocks rocket (October 10)
Scholars of genocide are criticizing the dangerous use of the Holocaust to justify Israeli mass violence against Palestinians…This weaponization of Holocaust memory by Israeli politicians runs deep. In 1982, Israeli PM, Menachem Begin compared the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in Beirut to Adolf Hitler in his bunker in Berlin… in October 2015, Netanyahu took this weaponization to… Read More Israel must stop weaponising the Holocaust
NB: A great scholar, a deeply humane person and an optimist of the spirit. This is sad news, but one must be grateful that she lived a long and fulfilling life. She and her husband Professor Chandler Davis were committed war resisters and anti-imperialist intellectuals. I salute them both; and offer my deepest condolences to… Read More Natalie Zemon Davis, Historian of the Marginalized, Dies at 94
The confusion has been encouraged over decades by propagandistic journalism…. reporting that refers to the hostility in Israel / Palestine as being between “Jews and Arabs”: a total misnomer… there are “Arab” members of the Jewish faith and Jews who oppose the Zionist project of a “Jewish state” of Israel… Unions should argue for the… Read More Gaza, trades unions, fascism & oppression
There is something about the pro-Palestine anger that isn’t really about Palestine at all, but what the entire state of the Palestinians represents. The protests are increasingly an immersive cathartic state of mourning for all the losses that many have to reconcile themselves with; the weakness and lack of solidarity and compact between a large… Read More As Gaza is bombed and starved, the Arab world watches a relentless injustice
NB: I am not an admirer of the Saudi regime, which I believe to be a brutal pseudo-religious despotism; but I appreciate this statement by their former intelligence chief. I couldn’t agree with him more. On the West’s shameless hypocrisy and double standards; their irredeemable racism and practice of collective vengeance on subjugated peoples; the… Read More Saudi prince slams Hamas, Israel with India praise: ‘Prefer civil disobedience’
Emma Graham-Harrison, Julian Borger and Ruth Michaelson in Jerusalem For two weeks Israel has pounded Gaza with missiles, as it gathers tanks and troops for a ground invasion with one stated goal, to destroy Hamas. It is a deceptively simple target, one which sounds urgent and necessary to many in a nation profoundly traumatised by the massacres of 7 October,… Read More Peacekeepers, Fatah or anarchy: what would follow an Israeli ‘victory’ in Gaza?
War, we were learning slowly, is a terrible thing that turns men into beasts, women into zombies and children into scarred and introverted human beings for the rest of their lives… Mrinal Pande When in primary school, we did not know or care about the Partition. Why would neighbours suddenly begin resenting each other enough… Read More Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, Really?
After the truth-shower 