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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jeffrey St. Clair.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Just because the ICH ruling was obvious, doesn’t mean it wasn’t exceptional, since proving the obvious has been almost impossible for the last 75 years when it comes to Israel. This is the first fissure in Israel’s impunity, a crack that will widen with each new massacre, swallowing its funders and arms suppliers along with it.
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A newspaper clipping glimpsed in a new documentary is headlined “New Mexico’s Infant Mortality Highest in U.S., Report Says.” Lois Lipman’s film explains why that rate is so high for babies, as well as for others, especially Indigenous and Hispanic inhabitants, in her gripping First We Bombed in New Mexico. Onscreen Tina Cordova, born and raised at Tularosa, only 30 miles from the Trinity Site, declares: “We are the first victims of the atomic bomb.” While the title of Lipman’s gripping 95-minute chronicle may be derived from Joseph Heller’s 1967 satirical antiwar play We Bombed in New Haven, this new production, which won jury and audience awards at the Santa Fe International Film Festival, is in the tradition of anti-nuclear bomb nonfiction classics such as 1982’s The Atomic Café, Judy Irving/Chris Beaver’s 1982 Dark Circle, Jim Heddle’s 1984 Strategic Trust: The Making of Nuclear Free Palau, Dennis O’Rourke’s 1986 Half Life, and Robert Stone’s 1988 Oscar-nominated Radio Bikini.
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The Post Office’s top management operated a startling double standard in mapping blame. While it maintained a tough-as-nails approach in the case of small branches, it adopted an entirely lenient approach in the case of so-called Crown Post Offices.
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What Bidenian Deescalation looks like in the Middle East: In the past week, Israel attacked Gaza and the West Bank. Lebanon attacked Israel. Israel attacked Lebanon. The US attacked targets in Syria and Iraq. Iraq attacked US bases in Iraq and Syria and moved to kick the US out of Iraq. Turkey and Iran attacked Syria and Iraq. Iran also attacked Pakistan and Pakistan attacked Iran. Jordan attacked Syria. Yemen attacked ships in the Red Sea and the US/UK launched airstrikes on Yemen, prompting Yemen to attack US Navy ships. Two Navy SEALs drowned in an operation off the coast of Somalia.
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The right-wing’s accusations attempt to distort the rationale of recent student protests through a loaded deflection: They demand suitable negative sanctions be applied against student advocates of “genocidal antisemitism.” Given the demonstrations and confrontations on this issue, the students who were punished at Columbia, the progressive anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, were opposing the Israeli occupation of Palestine and advocating ceasefire not genocidal antisemitism.
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Image by Asim Z Kodappana.
What we feel defines who we are and what we believe. Such a statement seems obvious to the point of tautology. Yet we often don’t behave as if we genuinely credit it. Many of us are, despite increasingly savage attacks from neofascist champions of unreason, still children of the Enlightenment. And broadly, the Enlightenment dream was to strengthen people’s reasoning powers to the point where they would persuade one another through logical, rational argumentation and public debates conducted with impeccable calm. Feelings were irrelevant to this project, unnecessary, potential bearers of error. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, one of the fathers of calculus, expressed this rationalist attitude especially clearly in 1679 when he wrote about his pet project to create a universal language, declaring with poignant optimism, “The only way to rectify our reasonings is to make them as tangible as those of the Mathematicians, so that we can find our error at a glance, and when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate, without further ado, to see who is right.”
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After decades of forced evictions, mass killings, warrantless arrests, restricted travel, stolen land, demolished houses, poisoned wells, razed orchards, embargoes and targeted killings, Israel has finally been placed in the dock to answer charges of genocide against the ghettoized and bombarded people of Gaza. And it took the South Africans to do it.
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“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so […]
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Here’s what we know about the state of Gaza on day 91 of the war: 30,676 killed (including those 7,000 presumed dead under the rubble); 12,040 children killed; 6,103 women killed; 58,960 wounded; 105 journalists killed; 241 health care workers killed; 283 health care workers wounded; 1.93 million displaced; 67,941 homes completely destroyed; 179,750 homes damaged; 169 press offices damaged or destroyed; 318 damaged or destroyed schools; 1612 damaged or destroyed industrial facilities; 201 damaged or destroyed mosques; 3 damaged or destroyed churches; 169 damaged or destroyed health care facilities (23 hospitals, 57 clinics, 89 ambulances); 198 archeological and heritage sites damaged or destroyed; 41 civil defense workers killed; 127 civil defense workers injured.
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Salvador Allende.
Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman is probably best known to Americano audiences for his play Death and the Maiden, a parable about torture that Roman Polanski adapted for the big screen in 1994, starring Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley (there were two other versions, a 2016 Iranian reboot plus 2020’s The Secrets We Keep, with Noomi Rapace and Chris Messina). From 1970-1973 the Buenos Aires-born Dorfman served as a cultural and press advisor to Salvador Allende, the democratically elected socialist president of Chile. In 1971 Dorfman co-authored How to Read Donald Duck, Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, which has just been re-published by OR Books.
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The Genocide Convention, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, were adopted in 1948. What else happened in 1948? The establishment of the state of Israel and the Nakba, right? So how, from this beginning, could international law accommodate ongoing colonization — which requires human subjugation, a hierarchy of life? That’s the antithesis of a declaration that says everyone has inalienable rights. Even the best laws are not applied equally. The greatest violators of international law, including the United States, are never held accountable. They wrote the laws, so it makes sense that they’ve created this system.
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For the past year, I’ve been compiling a list of the best American films of the 2000s—any production released between January 1, 2000 and December 31, 2009 made with primarily American financing. I decided to watch every single movie that I missed in that decade when I went to the movies the most, two or […]
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In contrast to other historical atrocities, the crimes against the people of Gaza–mass murder, manufactured famine, dispossession, looting of property, demolition of cultural and religious heritage, and forced expulsion–have all been committed in the open–the genocidal plans have been written about in newspaper columns and freely expounded on talk shows. You won’t have to excavate through secret archives, the evidence of these grotesque crimes is there for all to see. What they’ve said and what they’ve done is on the record. There can be no hiding from it. And those who’ve armed, funded, abetted and justified these genocidal measures should be condemned for their complicity.
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Image by Li-An Lim.
It’s not true that humanity is committing suicide, as exemplified by the COP28 farce of a climate summit. The world’s industrialists and financiers are committing humanity to ecocide. More than ever, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
Death by capitalism. That phrase has a certain catchy feeling to it. But it’s no joke, is it? No, no joke at all.
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Alex Saab was freed from US captivity in what Venezuelan Prof. Maria Victor Paez described as “a triumph of Venezuelan diplomacy.” The diplomat had been imprisoned for trying to bring humanitarian supplies to Venezuela in legal international trade but in circumvention of Washington’s illegal economic coercive measures, also known as sanctions. Negotiated prisoner exchange In […]
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So much of Gaza has been disfigured by Israeli/US bombs that it is now a different color from space. A New York Times determined that Israel routinely dropped 2,000 lbs. bombs in the area south of Wadi Gaza, the place the IDF had repeatedly ordered civilians in Gaza to move to for safety. The US-made MK-84 2,000-pound bomb can leave craters 60 feet deep and create blastwaves capable of killing and maiming people up to 3,000 feet away. The NYT report concluded that the IDF dropped at least 200 such bombs in southern Gaza, where “even for those who followed every evacuation order, there was still no safety to be found.”
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Image by Ashwini Chaudhary(Monty).
In the Twilight of the Idols, in one of his more peckish, dyspeptic moments, Nietzsche opined about freedom in terms that bear a striking resemblance to the deranged fever dreams of the modern American authoritarian Right. He declared:
“The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us…Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. Their effects are known well enough: they undermine the will to power; they level mountain and valley, and call that morality; they make men small, cowardly, and hedonistic — every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization.”
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Fifteen years after the US government used the Marshall Islands to test new atomic weapons and learn about the long-term effects of radiation on a human population (as Dennis O’Rourke terrifyingly documents in his 1985 film Half Life: A Parable for the Nuclear Age), Henry Kissinger gave his version of the numbers theory of genocide. […]
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As the nuclear industry flooded the commons with reassuring deception, Iodine 131 and a wide range of other radioisotopes were being ingested by the region’s children and mothers, women and men, plants and animals. The federal, state and local governments refused to compile a database or to track the health of the people in the area.
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Kill first, ask questions later: The IDF confirmed that they “mistakenly” killed three Israeli hostages after accidentally identifying them as a threat. The three hostages were shirtless, waving a white flag, and yelling “Help” in Hebrew. An IDF soldier declared they were “terrorists” and opened fire, killing two. One found cover. When he re-emerged, he was shot and killed.
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Photograph Source: IAEA Imagebank – CC BY-SA 2.0
Japan’s Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) is proceeding with its widely criticized plan to release more than a million tons of “treated” radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant into the Pacific Ocean over the next 30 years. Concerned scientists and citizens continue to question the safety of TEPCO’s choice to use ocean dilution as their solution to the radioactive pollution from the plant’s disastrous 2011 meltdown. Dissent includes experts from Beyond Nuclear and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
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Photograph Source: IAEA Imagebank – CC BY-SA 2.0
Japan’s Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) is proceeding with its widely criticized plan to release more than a million tons of “treated” radioactive wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant into the Pacific Ocean over the next 30 years. Concerned scientists and citizens continue to question the safety of TEPCO’s choice to use ocean dilution as their solution to the radioactive pollution from the plant’s disastrous 2011 meltdown. Dissent includes experts from Beyond Nuclear and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
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Far from being an obviously good economy that only partisans and the brainwashed could question, by any more specific measurement than “jobs are good,” the economy is in fact awful, and has relentlessly squeezed the average American for decades. Yes, on some level, it is better to have a job than not to have a job – but understandably, Americans seem to want a bit more from life than a place to clock in and clock out.
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Far from being an obviously good economy that only partisans and the brainwashed could question, by any more specific measurement than “jobs are good,” the economy is in fact awful, and has relentlessly squeezed the average American for decades. Yes, on some level, it is better to have a job than not to have a job – but understandably, Americans seem to want a bit more from life than a place to clock in and clock out.
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Hecuba: Alas! Alas! Alas! Ilion is ablaze; the fire consumes the citadel, the roofs of our city, the tops of the walls! Chorus: Like smoke blown to heaven on the wings of the wind, our country, our conquered country, perishes. Its palaces are overrun by the fierce flames and the murderous spear. Hecuba: O land […]
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Image by Etienne Girardet.
If capitalism is such a natural outcome of human nature, why were systematic violence and draconian laws necessary to establish it? And if greed is the primary motivation for human beings, how could the vast majority of human existence have been in hunter-gatherer societies in which cooperation was the most valuable behavior?
Cheerleaders for capitalism — who generate endless arguments that greed is not only good but the dominant human motivation — tend to not dwell on the origination of the system, either implying it has always been with us or that it is the “natural” result of development. Critics of capitalism, interestingly, seem much more interested in the system’s origins than are its boosters. Perhaps the bloody history of how capitalism slowly supplanted feudalism in northwest Europe, and then spread through slavery, conquest, colonialism and routine inflictions of brute force makes for a less than appealing picture. It is not for nothing that Marx wrote, “If money … ‘comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,’ capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”
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Most of us have in our head major events like the March on Washington and things Martin Luther King was involved in. I oftentimes remind students, “Martin Luther King was well-known; he could call the president; he’d receive protection from federal forces. But if you’re a student doing voter registration in rural areas, you’re not going to get that.”
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Netanyahu, who was pressured into acceding to the ceasefire by the irate families of Israeli hostages, seemed thrilled to be bombing Gaza once again, writing on social media: “Our forces are charging forward. We continue to fight with all our strength until we achieve all our goals: the return of all our abductees, the elimination of Hamas, and the promise that Gaza will never be a threat to Israel again.”
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The relationship between politics and occultism is often misunderstood. Despite popular conceptions of Nazi esotericism, or depictions in folk horror films like The Wicker Man, throughout modern history occult spirituality has regularly interwoven with progressive social movements.
Mitch Horowitz is a historian of alternative spirituality, and in his new book, Modern Occultism, he presents a sprawling history of the occult, looking at its revival in Renaissance-era Europe and the threads that connect it to antiquity and the present. While he examines many different strains within occultism, including ones associated with fascist and far-right movements, Horowitz presents a frequently liberatory view—socially and personally—of the diverse movement.
In this interview, edited for length and clarity, we discuss the radical history of occultism, and where the occult stands in relation to politics today.
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Now I see in Blonde the seed of the next six or seven years in American pop culture. The austere, bland, and politically correct atmosphere that ruled the 2010s was fading, its reign was extended a bit by the coronavirus pandemic. Blonde is not an objectionable film because its director doesn’t like, or possibly even understand Marilyn Monroe movies. It may be a bad film, but it becomes more and more interesting with time.
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