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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.
The post So Long, and Thanks for All the Hamburgers appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
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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.
The post The Women of Three Mile Island appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
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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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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.”
The post The Wisdom of Shooting Back appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
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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.”
The post I, Netanyahu appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
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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.
The post High Budget Sleaze appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
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This week, the IDF killed Bilal Jadallah, director of Press House-Palestine. Jadallah was one of the Palestinian journalists who provided “indispensable research” for the Committee to Protect Journalists’ “Deadly Pattern” report, released in May of this year that documented a pattern of IDF lethally targeting journalists and evading accountability.
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Image credit to Earth Liberation Studio.
As bombs continue to pummel Gaza, destroying hospitals and homes, leaving thousands of Palestinians dead and millions displaced, global action to stop the supply of weapons to Israel is an urgent imperative. Fighter jets, missiles, and thousands of bombs are amounting to a devastating level of explosive violence in the densely populated area of the Gaza Strip.
These weapons are instrumental in Israel’s genocidal actions; thus, the governments supplying them are complicit in genocide and other war crimes. And right now, while these same governments continue to pledge support to Israel’s alleged but unlawful “right to self-defence,” ordinary people are undertaking incredible actions to block the production and shipment of weapons.
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Image by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona.
I am writing an article I’d rather not write but feel compelled to do so. Amidst all the horror of Israel’s massacres and desire to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza in response to Hamas’ terror attack inside Israel, yet another conspiracy theory seems to have taken root among some people. Specifically, that Hamas’ attack was an “inside job.”
Shades of the 9-11 “truther” movement. The conspiracy theory here is that Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency could not possibly have been unaware of what Hamas was plotting and either knew the attack was coming and intentionally let it happen or — this is the most common version that has been circulating by conspiracy theorists — Israelis carried out the attack themselves using Hamas as a cover because the Palestinian organization is an Israeli front group.
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If you can be morally desensitized to the point of rationalizing the bombing of hospitals, turning off power in the neonatal ward, shutting off the water supply to dialysis rooms, and snipers spraying bullets in the oncology wing, what atrocities won’t be willing to justify?
The post Enter the Moral Abyss appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
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This year, the UK television program Panaroma released an expose on the comedian, activist and lifestyle guru Russel Brand. Brand is a British star but also someone whose celebrity has crossed international lines; he has appeared in several Hollywood movies, been interviewed frequently on many of the biggest news channels in the world and will probably be […]
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On December 21, 1919, the US military ship the USAT Buford set sail for the new nation formed in revolution the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). On board were two hundred forty nine anarchists, syndicalists and other so-called undesirable aliens, including anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. The Buford had a history as a troop carrier; it had carried US troops to the Caribbean and to the Philippines during and not long after the Spanish-American war. This mass deportation was part of a decades long campaign by the US government and the business interests it serves to destroy the revolutionary labor movement in the United States.
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“Palestinians are the only people in the world who have to prove they’re dead.” – Dr. Mads Gilbert + What Americans are witnessing in Gaza is a reiteration of our own history in real-time: Dispossess indigenous people, violently crush their resistance, blame any retaliatory “massacres” as an excuse to use overwhelming military power to wipe […]
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Image by Ömer Yıldız.
When Cyprus was illegally invaded by the Turkish Armed Forces in the summer of 1974, the international community took notice. Condemnations were issued. There were reports about the Cypriots who were killed, the women raped, the families separated, those who went missing (many still unaccounted for), the displaced refugees. We would only later come to find out the true depth of the atrocities committed or hear about the mass graves into which Cypriot bodies were indiscriminately tossed to quickly dispose evidence of the massacres.
But if you are reading this, you likely don’t know much about Cyprus, you may have not even heard the country’s name, let alone understand much about its past. If so, you are in a solid majority. In fact, I wrote this piece to explain why Cyprus and its history is unfamiliar to many and how this relates to what’s unfolding in Palestine and Israel right now.
The post On the Ethics of Violence: From Palestine to Cyprus appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
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Image by Mohammed Ibrahim.
The genocide in Palestine is the atrocity of the 21st century and if there are history books we will remember where we were, what we were doing, and who we were with. Many people don’t realize it yet, but they will, and it will be too late and the wrong lessons will be learned. But if you’re on the left you at least have the ability to see this atrocity in real time.
The left saw this coming. This is not the time or place to ask about the left. This is a serious moment that should be left to serious people. At this point I will admit that I am not one of those people. So addressing this question of the left is a nod to our only and final hope. It feels ridiculous to talk about the left at this time but I won’t pretend to understand anything else or even be interested in understanding anything else. At this point the left will save us or no one will.
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“I say that between colonization and civilization, there is an infinite distance.” – Aimé Césaire + Israeli historian Ilan Pappé: “They [Hamas] warned Israel: we will not sit idle as long as the political prisoners are not going to be released…we will do all we can to abduct Israeli soldiers and citizens so we have […]
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There are people who have made a career off Palestine, off essentially metabolizing our pain and our resistance, appointing themselves as pseudo-spokespeople or intellectual historians of this moment, who have been shown to be fundamentally unqualified to do so, essentially that they’re cowards. To avoid giving specific examples, I’ll say that I’ve found refuge in my comrades in PYM, and in those who’ve shown principled, unwavering solidarity with the Palestinian people. This is a clarifying moment, because, if this has not been enough for you to adopt solidarity with Palestinians, nothing ever was going to be.
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Shrouded bodies of bombing victims in the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza. Image: AJA, Egypt.
On Friday, Gaza went dark. The lights were shot out. The internet unplugged. The phone lines down. The power shut off. Gaza was alone under bombardment, some of the heaviest of the war so far. Killing 25 journalists and some of their families simply wasn’t enough. The word of how brutal conditions there are, how many women and children are being slaughtered and starved, was still leaking out, making half the world sick to its stomach. Gaza had to be cut off. Under a physical embargo for more than a decade, the IDF has now placed Gaza under an information blockade. Missiles, tanks and commandos coming in, but no words or images getting out. The only illumination is Gaza burning.
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