Category: Feature Articles

  • Hey, how about those “radical Left” Democrats? Have you heard about one of their big ideas on how to buck historical odds and win the mid-term elections this year? They’re counting on the Christian fascist Supreme Court to end women’s half-century constitutional right to control their own reproductive lives. What a gambit! What audacity!

    Why have the leading liberal, Democratic Party-affiliated pro-choice groups Planned Parenthood and NARAL surrendered in advance to the death of Roe v. Wade, announcing the rise of a “post-Roe era” without mass resistance in the streets and public squares? Why haven’t they followed the lead of Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights (RU4AR) by joining in rallies, marches, and direct actions under the banner of “Post-Roe? Hell No!”? Why have they refused to undertake giant popular mobilizations and direct actions on the model of successful abortion rights activism in Latin America? Why don’t they join RU4AR in donning the green bandana, the symbol of women’s and abortion rights protest in Argentina, Mexico, and Columbia?

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    The post Forced Motherhood as Democratic Electoral Strategy appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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  • Image by Hasan Almasi.

    The English word “custody” went from a mid-fifteenth century meaning of safe-keeping and protection to its late-sixteenth-century sense of restraint of liberty and confinement (probably not coincidentally in the years of the land enclosure riots), and it comes from the Indo-European root (s)keu-, meaning to cover or conceal. Even the most potted hypothetical history of the word and concept is suggestive about a species that, in the name of property and utilitarianism (with its justice-free notion of the “greater good”), fences off, encloses, locks up, hides away, demarcates, “owns” natural resources and all their human and non-human elements, and also tucks away gigantic concentrations of wealth by a tiny minority. Liberal regimes still try to suggest the protective sense, but you only have to look at who is in custody and who the custodians are, in prisons, refugee camps, institutions (like children’s homes), and also many private homes, to find general abuse by certain groups (usually male, white, heterosexual, well-off, and exercising social and political power) of certain other groups (usually powerless, dark-skinned, women, Indigenous, and socially and culturally marginalised people). In the end, this cruel confinement of all aspects of the lives of certain species, and certain human groups, this plundering of everything, human and non-human, in the name of some insane idea of “progress”, is one of the constructs of humanity that is now threatening the conditions of existence of all species, including our own, on planet Earth. Even in these dire circumstances, there’s not much honest examination of basic political categories and assumptions that have brought us to such a pass. And, when they are actually exposed, in the death-throes wailing of an incarcerated woman, any revelation is quickly covered and concealed ((s)keu-). Veronica, automatically ill-treated and silenced in her short life as a First Nations woman, brought it all out, laid it bare for anyone who wants to know, with her death.

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    The post How Veronica Died appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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  • The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (or Mormon church) works to maintain the public image of a loving-Christian religious group while simultaneously acting as an anti-queer international political organization. If you’re at all familiar with the church, you’re probably aware of their pro-nuclear family / anti-LGBTQIA2s+ politics. What you may not be as aware of is how their current anti-queer beliefs, practices, and policies are tied to 1) their past polygamous practices, as both are rooted in settler-colonial eugenic ideologies, and 2) the World Congress of Families, a known hate group founded and funded by Russian oligarchs.

    Polygamy was seen as uncivilized and thus not-white by many in the late 19th century United States. In President Hayes’s 1880 State of the Union, he called out Mormon polygamy proclaiming that “marriage and the family relation are the cornerstone of our American society” and asking Congress to reorganize Utah Territory to allow more “intelligent and virtuous immigrants” in.

    Immigration, marriage, and the family were as central to the rhetoric and politics of this Euro-settler-nation then as they are now. Settler-colonialism “destroys to replace” and “intelligent and virtuous immigrants” who become married and reproductive Euro-settler-couples are essential to the “replace” half of this equation.

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    The post The Roots of the LDS Church’s Opposition to Same Sex Marriage appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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  • Photo: Raja Krishnamoorthi – Congressman, IL-8, Facebook.

    Last week, United States Congressperson Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) was asked by a reporter, “What are your views on RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] and the Muslim genocide in India?”

    RSS is an all-male, far-right Hindu nationalist paramilitary organization that boasts more than one million men under arms and draws its ideological inspiration from Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party. Its political wing is Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is led by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a lifelong member of RSS.

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  • Image by mana5280.

    The whole world was watching when George Floyd was lynched but writer/director/producer Terrance Tykeem’s When George Got Murdered takes us behind the scenes after George’s assassin is incarcerated. This powerful production about the impact of Floyd’s killing focuses on the guards and inmates at the jail or state prison where Floyd’s liquidator, Derek Chauvin, is incarcerated as the former Minneapolis police officer awaits trial for murder and manslaughter after brutally snuffing the life out of the handcuffed Floyd while lying face down on the street on May 25, 2020.

    The Caucasian Chauvin’s extermination of the unarmed, helpless African American Floyd – who was pinned down for nine and a half minutes beneath the policeman’s knee on his neck as George pleaded to breathe and for his mother, as several policemen appeared to do nothing to stop Chauvin – was caught on candid camera by the heroic Darnella Frazier and others. After Darnella posted it on Facebook the teenager’s visceral, vivid cellphone video went viral, sparking demonstrations across America and around the world.

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    The post A New Film Inspired By the Murder of George Floyd appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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  • Did Agent Zula Nine Alpha lurk in the shadows of the blacksite in Thailand she ran as the two torture shrinks strapped a man down and poured water down his throat until he felt as if he was drowning, over and over again? Or did she step into the harsh interrogation light to let the […]

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  • Image by Jp Valery.

    In 2019, a U.S. airstrike in Syria killed 70 civilians, including women and children. This May, after conducting an “internal” investigation of what occured, the U.S. military concluded it won’t be necessary for any charges to be brought forward, and for anyone involved to face any consequence for what was essentially, a war crime.

    In due time, the rest of the world shall condemn the U.S., bring up sanctions. Major companies shall flee our borders, of course. The colors of flags of countries like Iraq, countries we’ve nearly helped destroy, will be emblazoned on billboards along New Jersey Turnpike and online as you purchase another box of masks from Amazon.

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    The post The U.S. Left and U.S. Empire appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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  • Capitalism marches on. And thus housing, because it is a capitalist commodity, has resumed its upward cost, putting ever more people at risk of homelessness, hunger, inability to access medical care and medications, or some combination of those.

    There had been a temporary dip in the costs of rentals in 2020 as the pandemic threw a spanner into the economy, but the dynamics of capitalist markets have reasserted themselves. Rent is not only too damn high but getting higher, fast. And almost everywhere, not just in your city.

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    The post As Long as Housing is a Commodity, Rents Will Keep Rising appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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  • Image by Max Böhme.

    In the ideological disciplines—the humanities and social sciences—it is rare to come across a theoretical work that doesn’t seem to fetishize verbiage and jargonizing for their own sake. From the relatively lucid analytical Marxism of an Erik Olin Wright[1] to the turgid cultural theory of a Stuart Hall, pretentious prolixity is, apparently, seen as an end in itself. In such an academic context, one of the highest services an intellectual can perform is simply to return to the basics of theoretic common sense, stated clearly and concisely. Society is very complex, but, as Noam Chomsky likes to say, insofar as we understand it at all, our understanding can in principle be expressed rather simply and straightforwardly. Not only is such expression more democratic and accessible, thus permitting a broader diffusion of critical understanding of the world; it also has the merit of showing that, once you shed the paraphernalia of most academic writing, nothing particularly profound is being said. Vivek Chibber’s The Class Matrix constitutes an exemplary demonstration of this fact, and of these virtues.

    Chibber has been waging a war against postmodern theory for some time now, ably defending Marxian common sense against generations of carping “culturalist” critics. His Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (2013) brilliantly showed that the Marxian “metanarrative” that has come under sustained attack by poststructuralists and postmodernists retains its value as an explanation of the modern world, and that many of the (often highly obscure) alternative conceptualizations of postcolonial theorists are deeply flawed. More recently, in an article published in 2020 in the journal Catalyst (“Orientalism and Its Afterlives”), Chibber has persuasively criticized Edward Said’s classic Orientalism for its idealistic interpretation of modern imperialism as emanating in large part from an age-old European Orientalist discourse, rather than from a capitalist political economy that—as materialists argue—merely used such a discourse to rationalize its global expansion. In more popular venues too, notably Jacobin, Chibber has argued for the centrality of materialism to the projects of both interpreting and changing the world. 

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    The post Common Sense in the Form of Theory appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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  • “Time for recess!” At those words, a shiver of joy ran through the tummies of everybody in the great big room. Recess! Yay! No more work, no more responsibility, just time to play and play! With their little hearts singing and their spirits soaring, they ran out the door and toddled as fast as their […]

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    The post Modern America’s Murderous Apotheosis at Uvalde appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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  • Death Pit. Image: Sue Coe.

    I grew up south of Indianapolis on the glacier-smoothed plains of central Indiana. My grandparents owned a small farm, whittled down over the years to about 40 acres of bottomland, in some of the most productive agricultural land in America. Like many of their neighbors they mostly grew field corn (and later soybeans), raised a few cows and bred a few horses.

    Even then farming for them was a hobby, an avocation, a link to a way of life that was slipping away. My grandfather, who was born on that farm in 1906, graduated from Purdue University and became a master electrician, who helped design RCA’s first color TV. My grandmother, the only child of an unwed mother, came to the US at the age of 13 from the industrial city of Sheffield, England. When she married my grandfather she’d never seen a cow, a few days after the honeymoon she was milking one. She ran the local drugstore for nearly 50 years. In their so-called spare time, they farmed.

    My parent’s house was in a sterile and treeless subdivision about five miles away, but I largely grew up on that farm: feeding the cattle and horses, baling hay, bushhogging pastures, weeding the garden, gleaning corn from the harvested field, fishing for catfish in the creek that divided the fields and pastures from the small copse of woods, learning to identify the songs of birds, a lifelong obsession.

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  • This interview with world-renowned scholar and leading dissident Noam Chomsky has two goals. The primary goal is to understand America’s role in one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 21st century, the Syrian civil war. While there has been a lot of commentary on the Syrian civil war, there is confusion about the exact nature of the American involvement in it. First, while the facts suggest that America’s role in the Syrian civil war was relatively marginal compared to that of others like the Assad government and its backers, primarily Iran and Russia, this goes against a belief held by sections of the anti-war left that America’s role was prominent. Second, there was a sharp difference between American involvement in the Syrian civil war and American involvement in the Kurdish regions of north-east Syria. While the former was through a combination of inaction and a CIA-sponsored covert operation with no direct involvement of the military, the latter was based on policies that came out of the Pentagon and involved the US military directly, primarily to fight ISIS. In fact, there is reporting to suggest that the two operations, when they co-existed, caused some confusion on the ground as well. While the CIA was offering support to rebel groups fighting Assad, the Pentagon offered to support groups only on the condition that they would fight ISIS and not Assad. Third, even focusing specifically on the Syrian civil war, the topic of this interview, American policy changed with time, depending on the circumstances of the war. Hence, there was no single policy. As such, even though the American role in the Syrian civil war was relatively marginal as noted above, examining it is of some interest.

    A second and more minor goal of this interview is as follows. There has been some controversy over Noam Chomsky’s views on Syria. Since Chomsky has not had much to say about Syria, the controversy is befuddling. It appears to be based on quoting bits and pieces of interviews out of context, rather than an examination of his core arguments. As such, this interview is an attempt to capture Chomsky’s core views of American involvement in the Syrian civil war. His views are necessarily brief owing to the relatively marginal nature of US involvement. Yet, this interviewer found them to be interesting and original. People who criticize his views can at least examine his views in their entirety and decide for themselves the exact nature of their disagreement. Those who read it with an open mind might even be surprised to discover areas of agreement.

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  • The remediation of nuclear waste has long been a classified endeavor. Accidents, exposure to radiation, and worker injuries on the job rarely, if ever, make the newspapers where they would receive public scrutiny. This is, of course, intentional. The less oversight, the easier it is to mislead and cover up mistakes. Take the case of the military’s Palomares disaster.

    On January 17, 1966, a collision occurred during a routine refueling operation of a B-52 bomber over Spain’s Mediterranean coast.28 The Associated Press reported first on the incident, writing that a KC-135 tanker with jet fuel had collided in mid-air with a B-52.29

    “At least five of the eleven crewmen aboard the two planes died in the crashes,” wrote the AP. “They collided miles above the earth. School children walking to their classes heard the rending of metal, then watched as smoke clouds erupted from the big planes as they spiraled down, scattered burning wreckage over a wide area.”

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  • Tribal fishing site at Sherars Falls on the Deschutes River, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

    For Indigenous peoples, environmentalism isn’t a hobby or simply protecting lands, livelihoods, creatures, and water. It’s inseparable from ancestral, community, and traditional practices springing from and belonging to the natural world. The community includes animal, vegetable, and mineral components of the environment and this is reflected in language. There’s a close-knit correlation between linguistic diversity and biodiversity.

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    The post All Our Relatives appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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  • If it’s true, as General William Tecumseh Sherman reputedly observed during America’s Civil War, that “war is hell,” according to Kyiv-born Maryna Er Gorbach’s Klondike, the “hottest seat in hell” (to paraphrase Dante) seems reserved for those ensnared in the civil war in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region. One of the grimmest films I’ve ever seen, Klondike is so bleak in its realistic depiction of warfare that it almost makes two antiwar classics that won Best Picture and Best Director Oscars – Lewis Milestone’s1930 All Quiet on the Western Front and Oliver Stone’s 1986 Platoon – look like musical comedies in comparison.

    As Oksana Cherkashyna, who stars as Irka, told the audience after a SEEfest screening at the Lumiere Cinema in Beverly Hills, Klondike dramatizes actual events that took place when the war between Russia and Ukraine really “started eight years ago” in 2014, with armed conflict in the Donbas, while what we’re witnessing now is “a full-scale invasion” by the Russian Federation of Ukraine.

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  • Mural in honor of Shireen Abu Akleh, Gaza City.

    Shireen Abu Akleh specialized in covering the funerals of Palestinians killed by the IDF. She had reported on dozens for Voice of Palestine and Al Jazeera. But none quite like her own, when thousands of mourners gathered at the St. Joseph’s Hospital to escort her casket through the streets of Jerusalem, two days after she had been shot in the head by an Israeli sniper.

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  • The gap between what needs to be done to save the Earth from the environmental disaster of unchecked global warming and what is actually being done continues to widen. Yet another exemplar of this gap is the funding practices of the world’s biggest banks. Capitalists not concerning themselves with small things like the future ability […]

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    The post Banks Fueling Global Warming is Business as Usual appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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  • Image by Jon Tyson.

    Richard R. Troxell is the Moses of homelessness. He’s been leading his people toward the promised land for many decades. His people are America’s homeless, a fluctuating group most people work hard to avoid. Troxell comes to see them clearly through street contact and annual surveys, always deepening his understanding of homelessness even as municipalities deepen their never-ending efforts to force the homeless to go away.

    The problem with the homeless is they don’t have anywhere to go. Shoo them out of doorways and they move to the parks. Chase them from the parks and they move to the freeways. Give them bus tickets to other towns and those towns try to send them right back. Give them housing? Don’t be ridiculous; this is America!

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    The post The Solution to Homelessness Is Not Death appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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  • As Russian forces were closing in on a bunker on April 21 in the heavily bombed and surrounded Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, preparing on an assault on the “fortress-like” underground bunker where an estimated 2000 remaining Ukrainian troops are said to be holed up, Russian President Vladimir Putin reversed his order and told Russian troops to surround the hard-pressed Ukrainians until, out of ammunition, food, and water, they came out voluntarily.

    Reporting on this decision, the New York Times, in an update to a story on the city’s final battle, claimed Putin had made the decision to avoid his troops having to fight their way through tunnels taking inevitably heavy casualties. What the Times didn’t mention was Putin’s saying that he also did not want to have fought in the bunker (or clearly, to hit it with a bunker-busting bomb, which could have been done long ago) because of hundreds of civilians said by Ukrainian sources to be “hiding” there. Russia views them as captives being used by the mostly Azov Battalion forces as hostages (itself, if true, a war crime).

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    The post The Bias in the Ukraine War Coverage appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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  • What about whataboutism? This new and misleading term now appearing in social media posts usually about the war between Russia and Ukraine is an attempt to deny the role history plays in current events. In essence, those who use this term to dismiss critiques of the war they disagree with are promoting an ahistorical approach that pretends that in the discussion of the war history began with the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. When one takes this approach, they can pretend that nazism is not a factor in the Ukrainian government, that NATO was not created to provide a military force to enhance Washington’s post World War Two push for market hegemony, and that it is not the US military that is the most murderous since the end of World War Two. Furthermore, the use of this term is quite often effective in shutting down any attempt by those opposed to the war to explain the whys and wherefores of their opposition.

    Denying history has its uses. In Israel, the denial of history gives the rulers in Tel Aviv the rationale to steal land from those who have possessed it for centuries. Likewise, the Israeli denial of Palestinian history provides its military and its settlers a rationale for their brutality and arrogance. In the United States, the denial of history can take a variety of forms. It can be as openly racist as a politician like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis banning books discussing the history of slavery in the US; it can also be as brutal as a white cop kneeling on George Floyd’s neck until he dies or another white cop shooting a Black man in the back of the head after tackling him during an unwarranted traffic stop. Denying history in the United States can also mean putting a Black man or woman in a position of power while at the same time rejecting legislation that could begin to resolve the economic inequality experienced especially by non-white people that is the legacy of a white supremacist past. In Britain, denying history is what gives people the idea that Winston Churchill was a great man of war and peace and not the racist mass murderer history proves he was.

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    The post What About History? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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  • Still from Straight Outta Compton.

    Ours is not the first era in which adults have persecuted the young and criminalized them. But in this country it’s not been done before with such methodical zeal, ever since that salesman of the virtues, Bill Bennett, co-chaired the Council on Crime in America and issued a 1996 report titled The State of Violent Crime in America containing these ominous words and utterly inaccurate predictions: “America is a ticking violent crime bomb. Rates of violent juvenile crime and weapons offenses have been increasing dramatically and by the year 2000 could spiral out of control.”

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  • Before Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book there was The Little Red Song Book, which included lyrics to rabblerousing ballads written by labor troubadours such as Joe Hill in order to organize the Industrial Workers of the World. A 1979 documentary about the IWW is being re-released on April 29, making the stand-up-and-cheer The Wobblies – as IWW members were nicknamed – the absolutely perfect film to see for May Day.

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  • Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

    The great American novelist John Steinbeck was born in 1902 and died in 1968 – the same year a wave of radicalism perfumed across the world; from the revolutionary upheavals in France to the anti-Vietnam war protests which were exploding across the US, from the Civil Rights movement to the Prague Spring.   Steinbeck himself had come of age as a novelist some decades before, in the context of another great historical shift – the depression era dust-bowl migrations which saw vast swathes of rural poor take to their caravans and carts, seeking out the brighter horizons of the Californian coast.

    Steinbeck’s greatest novel, The Grapes of Wrath, was infused with this spirit of historical change; the desperation, hope and courage of the poverty-stricken who have taken to the road, as the thunder rumbles in the darkness above, and the conditions of their former existence fade into the past.  Steinbeck’s novel was a masterful, searing and tragic depiction, not simply because he felt, with an artist’s intuition, something of the great change which was moving through society and uprooting all the traditional certainties of yore, but also because he understood to a tee the spirit and psychology of those individuals who were swept up in it.

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  • Black studies or Africana Studies emerged from the larger social and political movement of global Black liberation in the late 1960s as a nascent academic field. Notably, Black students at San Francisco State College in 1968 mobilized a mass protest strike to demand their ‘white’ controlled institution alter its curricula centering Europeans to study people of the African diaspora, and to re-center their teaching and scholarship to meet the needs of everyday people, particularly African people. Their protest led to the creation of the first Black Studies department in the United States. According to Turner and McGann, the intellectual foundation of Black Studies began with sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois who maintained that within the context of a white supremacy capitalist society only skilled Black scholars could provide an accurate interpretation of Black life. Historian Carter G. Woodson was also a founding framer of Black Studies who created the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History in 1915 to promote the study of Black life and history in order to “bring about harmony between the ‘races’ by interpreting one to the other.” Du Bois and Woodson’s contribution to the development of Black Studies is often erased, just as are the various movements throughout history that called for the recognition of Black contributions to the advancement of humanity and knowledge.

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    The post The Growing Need for Insurgent Black Studies appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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  • John Reed’s Snowball’s Chance takes its intriguing departure from Animal Farm, and set me thinking again about Orwell. These days I can’t get through almost any page of Orwell without a shudder, though in my teens I often had the Penguin selection of his essays in my pocket. I’d learned to loathe Animal Farm earlier at my prep school, Heatherdown, where any arguments for socialism would be met with brays of “and some are more equal than others” by my school mates.

    Some writers admired in adolescence stay around for the rest of the journey, perennial sources of refreshment and uplift: P.G. Wodehouse, Stanley Weyman, H.L. Mencken, Flann O’Brien, to name but four I’d be glad to find in any bathroom. Now, why can Mencken delight me still, while the mere sight of a page of Orwell carries me back to memories of England and of British-ness at full disagreeable stretch: philistine, vulgar, thuggish, flag-wagging?

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  • More than two years on, it is hard to imagine there could be someone who is not sick of the pandemic. Although we can point to multiple reasons for the inability to bring Covid-19 under control, a prominent factor is corporate greed.

    The elevation of the private profit of a few over the welfare of the many is, sadly, the ordinary course of events in a capitalist world. This is brightly illustrated by the failure of the world’s governments to prioritize health care over money as exemplified by the ongoing failure to make vaccines available to the Global South.

    Business as usual, yes, and it would be easy enough to lament the standards of the United States and its wildly expensive health care system being exported to the rest of the world. The U.S. does play a role here, but this time the U.S. is not the biggest villain. The European Union, with its obstinate refusal to waive any intellectual property rule because of fealty to Covid-19 vaccine makers, has been the biggest roadblock.

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  • Films are made in one time, but accrue fresh meaning in another. I saw Last Year at Marienbad in 1977. That was not the same film I watched this week. It’s the same cut, the same length, the same aspect ratio, the same French dialogue subtitled into the same English. But it is not the […]

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  • Alexander Dugin, 2019.

    Alexander Dugin is quite possibly, after Steve Bannon, the most influential fascist in the world today. His TV station reaches over 20 million people, and the dozens of think tanks, journals and websites run by him and his employees ultimately have an even further reach. You, dear Counterpunch reader, will almost certainly have read pieces originally emanating from one of his outlets.

    His strategy is that of the ‘red-brown alliance’ – an attempt to unite the far left and far-right under the hegemonic leadership of the latter. On the face of it, much of his programme can at first appear superficially attractive to leftists – opposition to US supremacy; support for a ‘multipolar’ world; and even an apparent respect for non-western and pre-colonial societies and traditions. In fact, such positions – necessary as they may be for a genuine leftist programme – are neither bad nor good in and of themselves; rather, they are means, tools for the creation of a new world. And the world Dugin wishes to create is one of the racially-purified ethno-states, dominated by a Euro-Russian white power aristocracy (the ‘Moscow-Berlin axis’) in which Asia is subordinated to Russia by means of a dismembered China. This is not an anti-imperialist programme. It is a programme for an inter-imperialist challenge for the control of Europe and Asia: for a reconstituted Third Reich.

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  • David N. Bossie, the Citizen in Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court case that opened the floodgates to unlimited corporate cash in American elections, the author of take-down books against the Clintons and puff-books for Donald Trump, whose 2016 presidential campaign siphoned plenty of unlimited corporate cash – that David Bossie – has released a new movie called Rigged complaining about unlimited corporate cash in the 2020 election.

    Rigged makes a case that the 2016 election was stolen by Mark Zuckerburg and other corporate donors who ran successful get-out-the-vote drives to ensure all Americans would be able to exercise the franchise. In hindsight, Bossie, Trump, Steve Bannon and Ted Cruz don’t like that and think “it shouldn’t be allowed,” to quote Donald Trump being interviewed by Bossie in the film.

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  • Ruins of a bombed hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine. (CNN)

    Putin may have been tempted, lured, baited or even duped into invading Ukraine. He may have been lied to by his own generals and spymasters. He may not be the grand strategists so many thought. But he alone pulled the trigger. His tanks crossed the border. His bombs destroyed city blocks, hospitals, train depots. His army is occupying foreign ground. Excuses can be made. But they only mitigate his crimes, they don’t exculpate them.

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