Global
Haitian director/co-writer Raoul Peck’s well-made The Young Karl Marx is one of the most significant biopics in cinema history and arguably among the genre’s best. As the 200th anniversary of the birth of communism’s co-founder approaches, Peck has beautifully dramatized Marx’s life during the 1840s as a 20-something lover, writer, husband, philosopher, father, journalist, friend and above all, revolutionary. Berlin-born actor August Diehl (Quentin Tarantino’s 2009 Inglourious Basterds) delivers a moving, truthful performance as the thinker whom - as this movie reveals - was also a man of action.
If you had just asked me if peace needed a “business plan,” I’d have replied, “Sure! Just like it needs a toupeed golfing fascist reality-TV creep in the White House! That’ll just about fix everything! War is over! Thanks!”
But after reading Scilla Elworthy’s book The Business Plan for Peace, I say, “Yeah, OK, that sounds pretty good, actually. Here, let me tweak it some!” In fact, I’ve added this book, despite some quibbles, to my bookshelf of war abolition advocacy. (Read em all! Send me others!)
Bob talks about Trump's latest desire for a military parade, his immigration policies and about Edith Espinal, the Mexican woman currently in sanctuary in Columbus. The last 15 minutes are from a recent fundraiser for Edith.
http://www.wcrsfm.org/content/other-side-news-feb0918-fascistic-trump-a…
Nikolas Cruz, the south Florida shooter, was enrolled in the Army’s Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps (JROTC) program as a 9th grader at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The Army taught Cruz to shoot lethal weapons at a very young and impressionable age.
Few in America have connected the dots between military indoctrination and firearms instruction on the one hand, and the propensity for training mass killers, whether their crimes are committed as enlisted soldiers in atrocities overseas or in American high schools.
Let’s examine the JROTC program and the militarization of Florida’s schools as a contributing factor to the Parkland massacre. When Cruz was apprehended he was wearing his JROTC polo shirt, sending a message to the world of his affiliation with the military program.
Students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School practice in the school’s firing range.
“Our hopeless, futureless, jobless, parentless, abused, neglected, over-indulged, unloved, sleep-deprived, mal-nourished, over-vaccinated, over-drugged and bullied children, whose main reason for living has been their addictive screen-time, their first-person shooter video games, their isolating FaceBook “friendships” and the media’s glorification of war and violence are understandably angry when they are ‘dissed’, or witness someone else being abused or see corporate criminals ‘getting away with murder’”.
Ho hum, there was another mass shooting at another school a few days ago.
Once upon a time in the United States there was a general perception that organizations like the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were both apolitical and high-minded, existing only to calmly and professionally promote the safety and security of the nation. Directors of both organizations often retired quietly without fanfare to compose their memoirs, but apart from that, they did not meddle in politics and maintained low profiles. There was a widespread belief at CIA that former officers should rightly retire to a log cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains where they could breed Labrador retrievers or cultivate orchids.
Original at Reader Supported News: http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/48453-why-are-we-still-i…
It’s so easy to paper over the real American security void with verbiage about strength vs. weakness and the endless need to upgrade the military.
Here’s Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, for instance, quoted the other day in The Guardian: “It is incumbent upon us to field a more lethal force if our nation is to retain the ability to defend ourselves and what we stand for.”
Mainly due to Warren Beatty’s classic 1967 movie, most film fans know who the “Barrow Gang” was - Bonnie and Clyde Barrow’s band of bank robbing desperadoes who roamed the Midwest during the 1930s. But thanks to the Pan African Film Festival, now I know who Errol Walton Barrow was - the independence leader who became Barbados’ first prime minister. I had never heard of him until I was lucky enough to catch Marcia Weekes’ docu-drama Barrow - Freedom Fighter at a PAFF screening, narrated on and off camera by America’s first Black Attorney General, Eric Holder (who has Barbadian heritage).