Sometimes things happen and it’s best to keep your disagreements to yourself. People who you cannot countenance not having on your side; people who you turn to for help, to think things through, start adopting a form of behaviour that you find alien. So alien to the high regard you hold them in, that you want to do the equivalent […]
Anyone else think it’s time our governments stopped colluding with radical Islam? Stopped arming, training and financing these crazed psychopaths? Imposed sanctions on their ideological sponsors, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia? No? Ok, fuck it, its just me then!
Years spent depicting head chopping fanatics as rebels, moderates, and revolutionaries in an effort to effect the toppling of another secular government in the Middle East. Years spent cultivating Saudi Arabia as an ally against extremism and fanaticism rather than treating it as a country where extremism and fanaticism resides. Years spent treating the Assad government, Iran, and Russia as […]
I write in despair. Despair of course at the depravity displayed by the murderers of innocents in Paris tonight; but an even deeper despair at the depravity of the egregious murderers who have brought us to this ghastly place in human history: those gilded figures who have strode the halls of power for decades in the high chambers of the West, killing innocent people by the hundreds of thousands, crushing secular opposition to their favored dictators — and again, again and again — supporting, funding and arming some of the most virulent sectarians on earth.
An article in the Australian publication New Matilda gets to the real point about last night’s attacks in Paris – one that no one wants to talk about. What westerners feel right now is a powerful and very selective outrage that identifies with the suffering of people “like us”. We mourn the deaths in Paris while not even noticing those […]
It was nothing short of a privilege to meet men and women who embody and demonstrate the kind of bravery not celebrated by our corporate media, a media that operates with a slavish adherence to an elite-friendly narrative only interested in drumming up support for more illegal and immoral military action around the globe. It’s an end arrived at only by exploiting the public’s distorted notion of patriotism, fostered on overdrive every year during Remembrance season. But how incredibly powerful it is to talk to people like members of Veterans For Peace who have had a change of mind and heart so profound that their entire worldview is shattered, only to be rebuilt on truth.
The Guardian’s “Let’s Hate Russia” crusade, like the old Windmill Theatre, never closes. It’s a 24/7 op and needs a constant supply of attack pieces to keep those fires of division and racism stoked. So it’s not surprising a lot of barrel-scraping has to be done, and in fact sometimes the results can be so unintentionally self-parodying they become almost […]
With its links to the arms trade, increasingly militarised presentation of Remembrance, and growing commercialisation and corporatisation of the poppy “brand”, it’s time to reconsider whether the Royal British Legion is still suitable to be the “national custodian of Remembrance”. My Name is Legion: The British Legion and the Control of Remembrance explores how the Royal British Legion’s status as […]
The attack on our hospital in Kunduz destroyed our ability to treat patients at a time when we were needed the most. We need a clear commitment that the act of providing medical care will never make us a target. We need to know whether the rules of war still apply.
George Orwell’s nightmarish vision of a totalitarian society casts a dark shadow over the United States. As American society has moved from a welfare to a warfare state, the institutions that were once meant to further justice and limit human suffering and misfortune and protect the public from the excesses of the market have been either weakened or abolished.
Yemen is no stranger to conflict. Under the Obama administration, the country has been subject to years of lethal drone strikes, which Washington, for the most part, claims were targeted at al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Washington regards AQAP as the most deadly branch of al-Qaeda. However, in practice, these drone strikes have resulted in thousands of civilian deaths. […]
The Aleppo power plant is a 1,000 megawatt thermal plant in five units build by Mitsubishi Heavy Industry in 1995-1998. It is situated some 25 kilometers east of Aleppo city center. During the fighting around Aleppo various electricity distribution stations were damaged and electricity in parts of the city has become scarce and unpredictable. But the main power station had […]
