Global

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The Tidal Wave of Indigenous Cinema continues to swell with Hawaiian filmmaker Ciara Lacy’s stirring This is the Way We Rise, a poetic short about Polynesian slam poet Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio now playing at the Sundance Film Festival. Jamaica is the daughter of Jon Osorio, Dean of Hawaiʻinuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge at the University of Hawaiʻi, an author and renowned songwriter who composed one of my three favorite Aloha “State” songs, “Hawaiian Soul”, about the fabled Native activist George Helm.

It seems that Jamaica has picked up not only her talented dad’s way with words, but also his commitment to the struggle for the liberation of the Kānaka Maoli (indigenous people of Hawaiʻi). In Rise we see Jamaica perform slam poetry at various venues, including Nuyorican Poets Café in Manhattan and the White House for the Obamas and their daughters (the former president, of course, was born in Oahu – not that he ever lifted a finger to help the Hawaiians that I know of).

What makes the current state of war against “terrorism” so dangerous is that the national security apparatus has been politicized, Phil Giraldi writes.

President Joe Biden has already made it clear that legislation that will be used to combat what he refers to as “domestic terrorism” will be a top priority. That means that his inaugural speech pledge to be the president for “all Americans” appears to apply except for those who don’t agree with him. Former Barack Obama CIA Chief John Brennan, who is clearly in the loop on developments, puts it this way in a tweet where he describes how the new Administration’s spooks “are moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about [the] insurgency” [that includes] “religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians.”

On the January 25th global day of action to end the war on Yemen one of the most dramatic actions that moved the demand for peace into the most media stories was taken by members of World BEYOND War and our allies, including Labour Against the Arms Trade in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

We blocked trucks outside Paddock Transportation International. Paddock ships armored vehicles to Saudi Arabia for the Saudi-led war on Yemen — or at least it tries to!

Paddock’s trucks were delayed and their office flooded with calls. A great deal of attention was brought to the issue. For the first time, a Liberal Member of Parliament broke with the government’s position and publicly supported our demands.

Robin Lutz’s visually compelling, inventive M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity strikes just the right note of whimsy in exploring the graphic art of a talent known for his sense of the whimsical. Just as his compatriots Bosch, Rembrandt, Vermeer and Van Gogh, created new ways of seeing with, respectively, surrealistic symbolism, chiaroscuro, photorealist style and Post-Impressionism, the Dutch Escher expanded the sense of perception on the flat “limited plane” of paper he imprinted with his unique “visualization of infinity.”

Escher called this sensibility “expressing endlessness” and stated: “I’m not an artist… I’m a mathematician.” The Dutchman’s thoughts and theories have been culled from his letters, diaries and notes. They are read aloud with panache by the English actor Stephen Fry (he has appeared in many mostly British films, such as 1992’s Peter’s Friends), who provides playful, lively, witty narration that sounds, in a good sense, like a performance.

“A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is Apartheid,” was the title of a January 12 report by the Israeli rights group B’Tselem. No matter how one is to interpret B’Tselem’s findings, the report is earth-shattering. The official Israeli response merely confirmed what B’Tselem has stated in no uncertain terms.

Arab normalization with Israel is expected to have serious consequences that go well beyond the limited and self-serving agendas of a few Arab countries. Thanks to the Arab normalizers, the doors are now flung wide open for new political actors to extend or cement ties with Israel at the expense of Palestine, without fearing any consequences to their actions. 

 African countries, especially those who worked diligently to integrate Israel into the continent’s mainstream body politic, are now seizing on the perfect opportunity to bring all African countries on board, including those who have historically and genuinely stood on the side of Palestinians. 

It took a variety of approaches to market the 2003 war on Iraq. For some it was to be a defense against an imagined threat. For others it was false revenge. But for Samantha Power it was philanthropy. She said at the time, “An American intervention likely will improve the lives of the Iraqis. Their lives could not get worse, I think it’s quite safe to say.” Needless to say, it wasn’t safe to say that.

Did Power learn a lesson? No, she went on to promote a war on Libya, which proved disastrous.

Then did she learn? No, she took an explicit position against learning, publicly arguing for the duty not to dwell on the results in Libya as that might impede willingness to wage war on Syria.

Samantha Power may never learn, but we can. We can stop allowing her to hold public office.

We can tell every U.S. Senator to reject her nomination to lead the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

By David Swanson, Executive Director of World BEYOND War, and Heinrich Buecker, der World BEYOND War Landeskoordinator in Berlin

Billboards are going up in Berlin that proclaim “Nuclear Weapons Are Now Illegal. Get Them Out of Germany!”

What can this possibly mean? Nuclear weapons may be unpleasant, but what exactly is newly illegal about them, and what do they have to do with Germany?

Since 1970, under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, most nations have been forbidden to acquire nuclear weapons, and those already possessing them — or at least those party to the treaty, such as the United States — have been obliged to “pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”

Let’s not forget: We are standing at the edge of global change. I believe what’s visible in this fleeting moment is our own evolution.

Let’s not let this moment flicker and die, to be replaced, with a despairing shrug, by business as usual. Donald Trump shattered the centrist political norms, sent chaos rippling through the corridors of power. Now he’s gone. We have to look through the cracks — these cracks in American exceptionalism — and see what’s possible. We have to make sure Joe Biden sees it as well.

And what’s possible is geopolitics beyond borders. What’s possible is addressing the truly profound threats that the planet — and the future — face, among them climate change and, with even more immediacy, nuclear war. The necessity for total nuclear disarmament — including American disarmament, for God’s sake — is more urgent than ever. This is bigger, by far, than reinstating the Iran nuclear agreement, necessary as that is. We must move beyond the world’s fragile pseudo-peace maintained by the threat of Armageddon. The time to move beyond this insanity is now.