radiofree.asia

Category: Feature Articles

  • Loneliness and Persuasion

    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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  • Israel in the Dock

    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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  • Murder Thy Neighbor

    “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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  • Dershowitz for the Defense?

    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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  • Suicide and the Novelist

    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 Legal Fight to End Genocide in Gaza

    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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  • Some Thoughts on American Cinema of the 2000s

    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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  • Genocide on the Installment Plan

    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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  • So Long, and Thanks for All the Hamburgers

    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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  • How the Campaign to Free Political Prisoner Alex Saab Succeeded

    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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  • Made in the USA

    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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  • The Thirst for Grandeur

    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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  • Just a Little Genocide

    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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  • The Women of Three Mile Island

    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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  • Who’s the Boss?

    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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  • The Radioactive Pacific Ocean

    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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  • The Radioactive Pacific Ocean

    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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  • What’s a Good Economy, Anyway?

    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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  • What’s a Good Economy, Anyway?

    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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  • The Gazan Women

    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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  • The Wisdom of Shooting Back

    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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  • I, Netanyahu

    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 Politics of the Occult: A Conversation with Historian Mitch Horowitz

    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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  • High Budget Sleaze

    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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  • Complete and Utter Carnage

    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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  • Stop Arming Israel

    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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  • Rational Thinking Versus Conspiracy Theories

    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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  • Enter the Moral Abyss

    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?
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  • The Russel Brand Conspiracy

    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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  • The Reality of Washington’s Enterprise

    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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