Global
In a time of endless war and triumphant cynicism, I found myself the other day unexpectedly walking through the doors of perception. Yeah, those doors.
“You know the day destroys the night/Night divides the day/Tried to run/Tried to hide/ Break on through to the other side . . .”
The words, the music — the Doors, the voice of Jim Morrison — ignite not just the Summer of Love but a crazy something I don’t dare call hope, because those days of cultural and political revolution overdosed and imploded, didn’t they? War won. The Vietnam War dragged on, millions died (or thousands, if the only death toll that matters to you is that of U.S. soldiers), MLK and RFK were assassinated, the Cold War quietly morphed into the War on Terror and eventually the 911 attacks gave the military-industrialists the “new Pearl Harbor” they needed. Today’s military budget is securely bloated.
Knowing this, I was blindsided by the impact a remarkable exhibition I recently attended with my daughter had on me. And the star of the show was born in 1757.
The Stop the War Coalition has just published a short summary of what’s wrong with foreign policy, going through a partial list of current wars one by one.
SHIP’S LOG, February 15, 2018 — How the Earthlings have survived is a mystery. Ever since the United States impeached and removed Donald Trump for accidentally live-streaming himself sexually assaulting a tourist (or was it really for refusing to bomb Moscow? unclear) events have spiraled out of control.
Trump is now residing on a private island, making offers by tweet of trillions of dollars to various nations in exchange for their willingness to bomb the United States. No nation is known to have yet accepted. Nor has anyone yet seen Trump’s tax returns. He may or may not have, or have access to, trillions of dollars.
Some of the earthlings believe the impeachment process drove Trump out of his mind, while others blame the water supply on his island abode. But 92% in a scientific survey conducted in 43 countries this week actually volunteered or wrote in: “When was he not out of his mind — WTF?”
Several years ago in Cameroon, a country in West Africa, a Western Black Rhinoceros was killed. It was the last of its kind on Earth.
Hence, the Western Black Rhinoceros, the largest subspecies of rhinoceros which had lived for millions of years and was the second largest land mammal on Earth, no longer exists.
But while you have probably heard of the Western Black Rhinoceros, and may even have known of its extinction, did you know that on the same day that it became extinct, another 200 species of life on Earth also became extinct?
This is because the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history is now accelerating at an unprecedented rate with 200 species of plants, birds, animals, fish, amphibians, insects and reptiles being driven to extinction on a daily basis. And the odds are high that you have never even heard of any of them. For example, have you heard of the Christmas Island Pipistrelle, recently declared extinct? See ‘Christmas Island Pipistrelle declared extinct by IUCN’.
BANGKOK, Thailand -- Pope Francis' first-ever visit by a Roman
Catholic pontiff to Buddhist-majority Myanmar which started on
November 27 will be closely watched for his reaction to the country's
bloody military campaign against more than one million ethnic Rohingya
Muslims.
Among the leaders he will meet during his four-day trip is Aung San
Suu Kyi whose silence about the suffering of the Rohingya sharply
contrasts with Francis' August statement lamenting the "persecution of
our Rohingya brothers and sisters."
The pope will also meet the military's Commander-in-Chief Gen. Min Aung Hlaing.
If the Argentine-born pope mentions the Rohingya while in Myanmar, it
will embarrass and dismay his hosts.
But if he silences himself, many others will be deeply disappointed.
During the pope's November 27-30 visit, "he will speak for all
suffering people belonging to all groups present in Myanmar," Fr.
Carlo Velardo, an attache at The Holy See's Apostolic Nunciature or
embassy in Bangkok, said in an interview.
Introduction
When I began this essay I thought I aimed at a rather modest target, but the “story grew in the telling” and reached out further and further to interweave more and more threads, and therefore required much more time and thought than originally foreseen. Yet I believe the effort to have been worthwhile, opening a bit of new territory for socialism. It sets out from one of Rosa Luxemburg’s most enduring postulates and conjugates it with the topic of civil disobedience which, (as far as the author knows, has never been associated this giant of socialist thought.
One of the protagonists of the civil disobedience movement was Rosa Parks, the other “rose” to whom this monograph is dedicated to and honored in the title, for being as a quintessential representative of civil disobedience as understood and practiced by Gandhi and King.
A further disobedient rose worthy of recognition is Sandra Harris who reviewed this essay and recommended addressing “class morality.”
A Disobedient Rosa: What Brings the Masses into Motion
Suddenly Staughton Lynd is all the rage. Again. In the last several years, Lynd has published a number of new books as well as new editions of classics such as Rank and File, plus a memoir co-authored with his wife Alice. In addition, two books about his life as an activist have been published, one on the years through 1970 by educator Carl Mirra (The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945-1970) and another about his work since 1970 by historians Mark Weber and Stephen Paschen, Side by Side: Alice and Staughton Lynd, the Ohio Years.
Zionism is a colonial movement invented in the 19th century to transform a
multi-religious Palestine to the apartheid “Jewish state of Israel”. It was
to be “a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization against
barbarism” (Herzl in the Jews’ State). This colonial racist idea remained
unchanged since founding of the “Jewish Colonization Association” in 1891
and the World Zionist Congress in 1897. Like all colonial movements, it
focuses on the dual task of destroying native life and creating new
exclusivist racist regimes and it gets support from empires and from
complicity.
Britain put the Al-Saud family in charge of the area of Hijaz (which was to
become the kleptocracy of “Saudi Arabia”). Abdul Aziz Al-Saud responded in
1915 to British requests by writing in his own hand: “I the Sultan Abdel
Aziz Bin Abdel Alrahman Al-Faysal Al-Saud decide and acknowledge a thousand
times to Sir Percy Cox the representative of Great Britain that I have no
objection to give Palestine to the poor Jews or to others as seen [fit] by
