صلح Pax سلام שלום Pace Hasîtî Barış 和平 Мир Peace Mir Friede Paix
From the Vaults II:
This is the second article of a series on foundations, academia and their role in Empire-building, first published in 1969. The first article can be read here.
Part III of this series, Sinews of Empire, is already available online and tells how these ‘billion dollar brains’, in conjunction with US federal support, created the sinews of a global empire.
Originally published in Ramparts, May 1969. Read the rest of this entry »
Introducing a new feature: From the Vaults. Here, we aim to highlight significant articles of historical value and contemporary import as they come across the digital desk and that may not be available elsewhere on the web.
While university and other library databases and archives are increasingly being digitized, there are still many important and interesting articles and publications that ought to see the light of day again. Often these have to be manually typed and/or digitally scanned by researcher friends, for which we are grateful.
This piece on liberal foundations in the USA co-written by ex-Marxist-turned neocon David Horowitz (yes, that David Horowitz). Read the rest of this entry »
Two excellent recent videos discussing Iraq and US foreign policy. The first is a panel featuring Jeremy Scahill, Laila Al-Arian, Chris Hedges and Seymour Hersh and showcases an important and wide-ranging discussion on how to withdraw responsibly and what is not on the US Congressional debating agenda. In the second video Chris Hedges talks about his latest book, co-authored with Laila Al-Arian, Collateral Damage: America’s War Against Iraqi Civilians.
Seymour Hersh, Jeremy Scahill, Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian in Conversation – 96 min – Jun 3, 2008
In the upcoming July 7 edition of the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh claims that the Bush regime has increased secret funding for clandestine operations in Iran. Read the article in full here; an accompanying article interview with Hersh is also featured (below – 7 minutes). *** See also Rebreaking the News: Two Months Later, Seymour Hersh Strains to Catch Up With CounterPunch by Alexander Cockburn for a critique of Hersh’s essay. ***
Hersh writes that while the funding was approved last year, the
scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the most valuable things you can do for yourself if you are a news-junkie and political animal is to subscribe to one or another of the social bookmarking sites to collect all your article links in one place. Clipmarks has a good community and service going, as do other bookmarking sites such as Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, Newsvine etc. I encourage students to develop annotated bibliographies and these are a good way of doing so, allowing comment on any resource that is found online, and allowing them also to be shared if desired.
Below are striking passages from four recent finds, among many collected at Del.icio.us. Meanwhile, this blog will be on hiatus for a few weeks in order to concentrate on various projects and will resume in due course at a later, as yet undetermined, date (now that’s specific, worthy of Sir Humphrey “In the fullness of time” Appleby in the incomparable UK Yes Minister series. Note to US and other readers: its quite funny and though set in the 1980s, has timeless and universal political-bureaucratic themes). Do check out some of the very fine blogs listed in the blogroll in the meantime. Read the rest of this entry »
An interesting look at the militarisation of the US economy from Nick Turse. While the US has long been a permanent war economy, the consumer dimension of the corporate overlap has not–until recently–been highlighted.
By Nick Turse | LA Times
Last month, a review of 2006 congressional financial disclosure statements by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics found that lawmakers have as much as $196 million “invested in companies doing business with the Defense Department, earning millions since the start of the Iraq war.” An Associated Press article on the report, however, offered a caveat: “Not all the companies invested in by lawmakers are typical defense contractors. Corporations such as PepsiCo, IBM, Microsoft and Johnson & Johnson have at one point received defense-related contracts.”
But the Associated Press is wrong. The fact is that corporations such as PepsiCo, IBM, Microsoft and Johnson & Johnson are, indeed, typical defense contractors. To suggest that such firms, and tens of thousands like them, only receive defense-related contracts at the odd, aberrant moment is specious at best. Read the rest of this entry »
Hundreds of military checkpoints, and no goods — or people — allowed in or out if you live in the Gaza Ghetto, under brutal siege. Need medical attention and care? Pregnant? Want to visit family? Need to go to work? Get fuel? Too bad. All this operates with Israeli regime impunity, who have been choking Gaza — the world’s largest open-air concentration camp — as well as “exporting” its apartheid model: see, in particular, Naomi Klein.
The graphic above was made by a wise fourteen-year-old (Adam) after hearing stories of the difficulties of life in Abu Dis in Palestine. H/T thanks to DesertPeace, originally sourced from WorldPressNetwork. Read the rest of this entry »
Graphic: Carlos Latuff.
The title is a play on the anti-proliferation catchcry: You can’t hug a baby in nuclear arms.
That, of course, is the idea, the result of a deliberate strategy and as a direct consequence of Israel’s prevailing self-definition and worldview. As surely as our cosmology informs our sociology, the abhorrent siege of the Gaza Ghetto continues, the result of the internal logic of Israel’s continued existence as an apartheid expansionist state, producing policies of continued ‘low-intensity’ ethnic cleansing, divide and rule and genocide as Ilan Pappe and others have described. Zaid Khan’s words are worth quoting again:
Nearly 70 years ago, in a small eastern European city, an oppressed and occupied people were under siege, living under atrocious and brutal conditions, lacking food, medicine, electricity, water, and slowly being strangled in the hope they would just disappear.
Warsaw Ghetto 1941 – Gaza 2008. Israel, you are a disgrace.
Two excellent videos. The first offers an on-the-ground look at what is going on in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, militarily occupied by Israel: youngsters and civilians being terrorised and several foreigners being deliberately targeted and killed to discourage the outside world scrutinizing the Israeli regime’s actions. This is an eyewitness report from Dispatchers Reporter Sandra Jordan on the unconscionable Israeli violence in Gaza directed both at Palestinian civilians as well as international aid volunteers and foreign reporters.
Produced by Rodrigo Vasquez and broadcast by Channel 4 in the UK (one could not imagine its equivalent broadcast in the USA, not even PBS), this 2006 report is, sadly, one of the best I have seen in terms of showing the daily impact of shocking Israeli violence on Palestinians, at a human level.
Within hours of arriving Sandra and Rodrigo are shot at and tear-gassed by Israeli troops breaking up a memorial service for Rachel Corrie, an American peace activist crushed by an Israeli Army bulldozer two days before—deliberately. Tom Hurndall and James Miller, a British peace protester and British cameraman were also both shot by the IDF, leaving one in a coma,and the other shot dead. While this is disturbing, it is a raw and important window into the levels of violence to which Palestinians are daily subject, particularly in but not limited to Gaza.
Following this, having just passed the sixtieth anniversary of the Deir Yassin massacre, a timely reflection from Deir Yassin Remembered on the pivotal event of the Nakba and what it means for Israelis and Palestinians today.
Dispatches: The Killing Zone (49 minutes)
Read the rest of this entry »
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