Edward Luce “Tweets don’t overturn signed agreements,” said a Saudi official last week. Amid America’s broiling ocean of surrealism, being instructed by a dynastic autocracy on the sanctity of the contract stands out. Donald Trump had claimed to amend a US-Saudi nuclear deal on his Truth Social site the day after it was signed. That… Read More Trump’s waning sway over the world
Tom Engelhardt ( Tom Engelhardt Substack) – I recently drove to a gas station in Massachusetts to fill my tank with regular gas, the cheapest around, and, to my surprise, given what’s going on, it was only $4.59 a gallon. Okay, okay, I take back that “only” and admit it. It’s not good to joke about the nightmare… Read More America’s Imperial Wars, from Korea to Iran
The World at First Light: A New History of the RenaissanceBernd Roeck Tom Verde Historians typically trace the birth of the Renaissance to fourteenth-century Florence. Then, after three centuries, that brilliant era of artistry eventually gave way to the Reformation, with its shift away from humanism, and the Enlightenment, which picked up (and ran) where… Read More Why the West?
As the bombing starts again, it’s clear the president has dragged the US into a limitless fiasco – and the world into an economic quagmire Simon Tisdall Feckless and clueless, Donald Trump is lost in Iran, unable to find a way out of the disastrous war he started. Once again, the US military is pummelling the… Read More Trump, not Iran, is the world’s greatest danger. He’s a one-man weapon of mass destruction
NB: An excellent commentary; except for one misnomer: when it comes to Western imperial establishments and their hangers-on, it’s not their moral stupidity, but their moral depravity that we are confronted with. The truth is as clear as crystal: they are irredeemably racist, as racist as the Nazi jurists who concocted the phrase ‘life not… Read More Gaza and the Problem of Moral Stupidity
Seham Tantesh in Gaza and Julian Borger in Jerusalem A Palestinian driver bringing food aid from the World Central Kitchen (WCK) into Gaza has been killed by an Israeli soldier “in a field execution”, according to witnesses and the local truckers’ association, which said it may suspend operations in protest. Ahmad Esleem was shot in the head on… Read More IDF accused of ‘field execution’ of Palestinian driver bringing aid into Gaza
Tim Barker, Dylan Saba Martin Luther King once called the United States government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” That formulation may be controversial, but no one denies that the US is by far the world’s biggest arms dealer, with a 42 percent share of the global arms export market. Since the Cold War, Congress… Read More Selling American Bombs
Hussam Abu Safiya faces ‘tangible danger to his life’ following 18 months in prison without charge or trial Emma Graham-Harrison in Jerusalem, Lorenzo Tondo and Sufian Taha One of Gaza’s most prominent doctors is almost unrecognisable because of severe injuries inflicted in Israeli detention, his lawyer has said, and faces “tangible danger to his life” after being held for… Read More Detained Gaza doctor almost unrecognisable after injuries in Israeli jail, lawyer says
The liberation of the American peoples cannot be achieved without the shedding of imperial weight, writes the Pulitzer prize-winning author in this somber essay marking the semiquincentennial VIET THANH NGUYEN The word I think of to describe the United States on its 250th anniversary is cruelty. There are other words, of course, that could describe… Read More ‘250 Years of Cruelty’ – Two essays on the ‘American Empire’ and How to Save the U.S.
What Gaza reveals about the ideology that shaped the modern West NB: Since October 2023, at least 20,179 Palestinian children have been killed; and 44,143 injured. 58,000 children have been orphaned. Palestine has the largest concentration of child amputees in the world. This is the blood soaked memorial of so-called western civilisation. And our cowardly government… Read More The End of Liberalism
After the truth-shower 