Inspiration

Israeli teen refuses to serve in army, likely to face jail time

For the past month, the news in Israel/Palestine has been filled with reports of more and more people killed, the vast majority of them Palestinians. As much of Israeli society is swept up in the fever of the most recent war on Gaza, there are those voices that refuse to accept a present, or future, filled with violence, occupation, fear and hostility. One of those voices belongs to Udi Segal, a 19-year-old Israeli from Kibbutz Tuval, who was sent to jail on Monday for refusing to enlist in the Israeli military.

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Gerry Conlon, RIP

The injunction to Rest in Peace is rarely more appropriate than it is for Gerry Conlon, but the restless, righteous anger of this good, gentle man will be terribly missed.

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Thomas Paine, Our Contemporary

“Where liberty is, there is my country,” Benjamin Franklin once said to Paine. “Where liberty is not, there is my country,” Paine replied. For Paine, the role of a citizen extended beyond national borders. The fight of those living under any system of tyranny was his fight. “When it shall be said in any country in the world ‘My poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am a friend of happiness’: when these things can be said,” Paine wrote, “then may that country boast of its constitution and its government.”

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Noam Chomsky and the Public Intellectual in Turbulent Times

Chomsky does not subscribe to a one-dimensional notion of power that one often finds among many on the left who view power as driven exclusively by economic forces.

For Chomsky, ignorance is a political weapon that benefits the powerful, not a general condition rooted in some inexplicable human condition.

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Tony Benn Eulogy by George Galloway

R.I.P Tony Benn

“Making mistakes is part of life. The only things I would feel ashamed of would be if I had said things I hadn’t believed in order to get on. Some politicians do do that.” – Tony Benn

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Former CIA Analyst Ray McGovern Sues State Dept. For Putting Him on Watch List

The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia three years to the date of Mr. McGovern’s brutal and false arrest at GWU during a speech of then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. After the arrest, the PCJF uncovered that then 71-year-old McGovern was put on a “Be On the Look-Out” list, and agents were instructed to stop and question him on sight. The reasons cited included his “political activism, primarily anti-war” — a clearly unconstitutional order.

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Why Bill Hicks Still Matters

Hicks was about ideas. When he railed about television as a soporific drug to lull the populace into a state of complacency and consumerism, or the Rodney King trial, or his more psychedelically inspired visions of a universe of vibrations, he was selling an agenda. He was punching at the establishment and the status quo and his stand-up was a statement saying our world can be better if we start thinking and questioning it.

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Before the NSA, this is how they spied on us

There was a time before the NSA was able secretly to collect personal data about us all, all the time. There was a time when it was much harder for our governments to know what we were up to. There was a time when they struggled to control the flow of information.

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Direct Action Must Be Remembered As Part of Dr. King’s Legacy

[D]irect action, as Dr. King understood it and practiced it, meant bringing a social institution or the society itself locally to a halt, to make the system scream, just like its victims screamed, to bring contradictions to a head, so that everyone could see what the real problem was, that is, to confront authority. And that’s not understood in terms of what King’s legacy is.

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Stealing J. Edgar Hoover’s Secrets

On March 8, 1971, a group of eight Vietnam War protestors broke into a Federal Bureau of Investigation field office in Media, Pennsylvania and stole hundreds of government documents that shocked a nation.

The stolen memos, reports and internal correspondence provided the first tangible evidence that J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was systematically targeting and harassing hundreds of American citizens then known collectively as “the New Left.”

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Snowden and Greenwald: The Men Who Leaked the Secrets

To the likes of [New York Times columnist David] Brooks, Snowden was a disconcerting mystery; Glenn Greenwald, though, got him right away. “He had no power, no prestige, he grew up in a lower-middle-class family, totally obscure, totally ordinary,” Greenwald says. “He didn’t even have a high school diploma. But he was going to change the world – and I knew that.” And, Greenwald also believed, so would he. “In all kinds of ways, my whole life has been in preparation for this moment,” he says.

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