Instruments of Empire Hugh Wilford, The CIA: An Imperial History: Basic Books: New York 2024 Reviewed by Ed McNally In the historiographical field of intelligence studies, ideological blinkers abound. The standard account in the American case is that the democratic mandate which brought the Central Intelligence Agency into being through the 1947 National Security Act… Read More The CIA: An Imperial History
The myth that news coverage turned Americans against the war persists. In fact, it was largely complicit in perpetuating the conflict Norman Solomon The last helicopter liftoff from the roof of the American embassy in Saigon on 30 April 1975 marked the end of the Vietnam war. Fifty years later, mythology about US media coverage of… Read More The US left Vietnam 50 years ago today. The media hasn’t learned its lesson
This long history of violence, skulduggery, and spying raises troubling questions about whether a corporation founded and staffed by dozens of individuals from such an organization can be trusted with billions of users’ private and personal data. By Alan MacLeod / MintPress News Google recently announced it would acquire Israeli-American cloud security firm Wiz for $32 billion. The… Read More Wiz Acquisition Puts Israeli Intelligence In Charge of Your Google Data
According to Apoorvanand Jha, a professor at DU, the university had informed him that his leave application could not be approved without consultation with the Union Ministry of Education. NEW DELHI: Delhi University (DU) professor Apoorvanand Jha said that the university administration has asked him to submit the text of his proposed lecture at an… Read More ‘Alarming’: DU asks professor to submit text of proposed lecture at US university for leave approval
Mr. Musk does have a theory for the assumption of power. That theory is to seize power with the dead robotic hand of the past. It remains for the living to wrest free of that grip. (NB: As Karl Marx put it; capital is dead labour ruling over human life. Lets recall the slogan the… Read More The Failed Ideas That Drive Elon Musk
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
The last decade in India has been marred by the institutionalisation of arbitrary power. Raghu Kesavan Kunal Kamra is an unlikely hero. He stands slightly hunched over, mic loosely held in one hand, the other occasionally pressed into service to express disbelief but often stuffed into a trouser pocket. His most recent special, Naya Bharat, reprises the… Read More How the attacks on Kunal Kamra undermine the freedoms of all Indians
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)
After the truth-shower 