On April 7, 2018, two Syrian Air Force Mi-8 Helicopters were spotted departing from Dumayr airbase towards the besieged Damascus suburb of Douma, which was in the final days of a years-long conflict between the Assad regime and various rebel groups, most prominently the Saudi-backed extremist faction Jaysh Al Islam. The group was known colloquially for Zahran Alloush, the despised warlord who ruled Douma and Eastern Ghouta with an iron fist until his assassination in a 2015 airstrike. The impoverished suburbs of Damascus had been among the first to rebel against the regime of Bashar al Assad when the Arab Spring protests spread from Tunisia and Egypt to Syria in 2011. By 2012 the Syrian regime had been ejected or withdrawn from much of Damascus, Aleppo, Daraa, Homs, Afrin, and Idlib.

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Image by Koshu Kunii.

Reading history books when I was younger, I felt a twinge of sympathy for the Europeans living in the first half of the 1800s, the revolutionaries manqué. I pitied those frustrated young reformers whose hopes were raised by the French Revolution, only to be crushed under Napoleon’s boot, then ground into the dirt by decades of repression and dictatorship during Metternich’s Congress of Europe. I sympathized even more with socialists forced to flee their homes after the failed revolutions of 1848, never to return. Living in anticipation of an epochal event, gathering your resources, saving everything up for the grand act, striking, then realizing, to your increasing horror, that you’ve failed and your window of opportunity has closed…then suffering the calamity of exile, or worse, the agony of remaining and watching your home become unrecognizably foreign: such a disaster was hard to fully imagine. The benefit of centuries passing is that you can pretend that history is safely squared away, something that happens to hapless people in the past, not to you.

But those reformers’ unenviable fate—watching helpless and horrified as the world morphs into something disfigured almost beyond recognition—is what my generation, the millennials, is suffering today. Yes, those millennials, over whom so much ink has been spilled in condescending attempts at psychoanalysis penned by septuagenarian op-ed columnists.

Ordinarily, I’m skeptical about making age-based generalizations: culturally and politically conservative millennials rarely get attention because they don’t fit the stereotype. And I’m very sympathetic to the idea that generational politics is a “socialism of fools” which misidentifies age as the essential political fault line rather than class. Age and class overlap, but class structure underlies our economy’s woes. Plenty of leftists above thirty-five possess a millennial ethos despite not technically being millennials. This isn’t a case of “don’t trust anyone over thirty.”

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It is an old canard pushed by rightwing pundits and officials that the U.S. media are “liberally biased.” This narrative again returned in Greenwald and Carlson’s conversation about news reporting on the Rittenhouse trial. But there’s little reason to take this rhetoric seriously. As an expert on political communication who’s spent the last two decades studying the question of political and ideological bias in U.S. media, and as someone who’s written 11 academic books on the topic, I can confidently say there’s been virtually no evidence presented by scholars of a pervasive liberal media bias. There’s plenty of research identifying an official source bias more generally. For example, my own research finds that journalists’ privileging of specific partisan sources shifts depending on which party controls government, with the media favoring Republicans when they control Congress and the White House, with coverage favoring Democrats when they control these branches, and with reporting split between coverage of both parties when control of the branches is divided between Democrats and Republicans. Journalists have even admitted to favoring the in-power party in their reporting, as they recently moved to privilege the Democratic Party in its maneuvering on Congressional spending bills, while ignoring the Republicans due to their minority status in government.

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Image by Cayetano Gil.

John F. Kennedy’s short book A Nation of Immigrants was first published in 1958, then reissued to wide acclaim after Kennedy’s assassination. That bestseller’s valorization of the immigrant experience became a staple of academic instruction in the 1960s. But in my elementary school classes in the early ‘70s I couldn’t help noticing that the only immigrants I heard about were white. My sixth and seventh-grade history classes seemed to mostly consist of tracking the routes of European explorers and conquistadores, with not even a passing mention of slavery or the attempted annihilation of Native Americans.

Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion is here to counter the orthodoxy that has prevailed in the years since the publication of JFK’s essay. Dunbar-Ortiz has written a number of important books, including Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War (2005) and Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment (20018); on the back cover of this latest work, the author Ishmael Reed describes her as “a one-woman wrecking ball against the tower of lies erected by generations of official and television historians — people who make a living glorifying slave traders and exterminators of Native Americans.” She is also a meticulous researcher who consulted an impressive number of primary and secondary sources in putting together Not “A Nation of Immigrants”. Dunbar-Ortiz doesn’t pull any punches but her arguments are always firmly rooted in the historical record.

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It happened in 2012. The facts were known at the time, but they got lost in the crowd of all the other killings, the hundreds that happened that year. Even so, it signified what was wrong. Now, ten years later, the film gives us focus. Lest we forget, lest we cease to understand the rules of the game, and what we have to change, it reaches across the sea of time, reminding us, “don’t buy the hype.”

What hype? “We’re just doing our job.” What job? Terrorizing an old man because he lives in a NY tenement, and says no? They imagine lurid crimes occurring behind all the cheap slum doors with their many locks and sheet-steel façade reinforcements. It took the cops 40 minutes to break in, to finally invade the apartment of a low income retired black former Marine whose only need for attention was a heart condition. And shoot him to death.

The name of the film is “The Killing of Kenneth Chamberlain” [Directed by David Midell, Produced by Morgan Freeman and Lori McCreary]. It is about an incident, correctly represented in the film’s title, which occurred in White Plains, NY, on November 19, 2011. You can watch it on YouTube. It has won many film festival awards.

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Screenshot from CIA pamphlet, “Baptism by Fire”

In this article, CIA mind-control programs are linked to experiments on returning Korean War POWs. Also revealed is the extent to which CIA officials from Projects Bluebird, Artichoke and MKULTRA collaborated with U.S. biological warfare efforts, including the top secret “processing” of high-ranking POWs who confessed to U.S. use of biological weapons. This is a long involved story, and the full history has never been told before.

***

It was the propaganda version of an incendiary bomb. In 1952 U.S. Air Force and Marine flyers, shot down during the Korean War, testified publicly that they had been ordered to drop biological weapons (BW) on China and North Korea. This was followed by written depositions that detailed each flyer’s knowledge about the germ war: who ordered it, where the weapons came from, the training involved, and the secrecy that surrounded the entire operation.

The confessions of the U.S. flyers (video 10:00-12:30 min), along with an arguably unprecedented degree of compliance and collaboration among U.S. prisoners of war in general, was cause for alarm among Pentagon brass and CIA officials. It would lead to a number of court-martials over the years following the Korean War, though — with the equivocal exception of Colonel Frank Schwable, who though ultimately cleared, was subjected to a Marine Corps Court of Inquiry — none of the BW POW confessors were court-martialed.

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Image by Debby Hudson.

Taken from an article by Taylor C. Boas about evangelicals and political power in Latin America, our title is another way of saying that, though the Greek origin of the word, euangelion, suggests good news, the burgeoning numbers of evangelicals in Latin America are very bad news for human rights, which are anathema to fundamentalist obsessions. With his book Plano de Poder: Dios, Os Cristãos e A Política (Plan for Power: God, Christians, and Politics, 2008), the Brazilian evangelical “bishop”, billionaire Edir Macedo, announces that the postmodern evangelical project is “to reveal, conscientize and wake up Christians to a biblically announced cause”, namely God’s “grand nation-building project” concretised by a “project of political power”. This time round, the elect aren’t the Israelites but woken-up Christians.

In the past two decades evangelicals in Latin America have gone from being marginalised foreign missionaries to powerful political mouthpieces. Explaining their rise as a religious phenomenon in which the lively “garage churches” of poor urban neighbourhoods displaced the theologically stick-in-the-mud Catholic church isn’t very enlightening. In quantitative terms, it seems simple enough: they’ve turned their numerical heft into political capital. But the important point is that the political arena in which they operate is neoliberalism for which, as a kind of theological superstructure or at least justification, they’ve become one of the Hydra’s many monstruous heads.

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