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When the U.S. public was told that Spain had blown up the Maine, or Vietnam had returned fire, or Iraq had stockpiled weapons, or Libya was planning a massacre, the claims were straightforward and disprovable. Before people began referring to the Gulf of Tonkin incident, somebody had to lie that it had happened, and there had to be an understanding of what had supposedly happened. No investigation into whether anything had happened could have taken as its starting point the certainty that a Vietnamese attack or attacks had happened. And no investigation into whether a Vietnamese attack had happened could have focused its efforts on unrelated matters, such as whether anyone in Vietnam had ever done business with any relatives or colleagues of Robert McNamara.

A suicide bomber inflicts hell at a concert hall in Manchester, England that’s full of children, as though that was the point — to murder children.

The horror of war . . . well, terrorism . . . doesn’t get any worse.

And the media, as they focus on the spectacle of what happened, as they cover the particulars of the tragedy — the suspect’s name and ethnicity and apparent grievances, the anguish of the survivors, the names and ages of the victims — quietly tear the incident loose from most of its complexity and most of its context.

Yes, this was an act of terror. That piece of the puzzle is, of course, under intense scrutiny. The killer, Salman Abedi, age 22, was born in England to parents of Libyan descent and had recently traveled to Libya (where his parents now live) and Syria, where he may have been “radicalized.” He likely didn’t act alone.

ISIS has claimed credit.

President Trump is in Saudi Arabia where he will instruct his puppets then
go to apartheid Israel where get further instructions from his masters. He
will do a token visit to Bethlehem Tuesday and desecrate the city of the
Prince of Peace with his entourage of racist Zionists. I wish I was there
to join demonstrations against this symbol of hypocricy (I am still in
Europe). Everyone now knows that the US government, Israel, and the Saudi
regime have been the biggest perpetrators of terrorism and genocide in the
world. This is to serve one interest and one interest only: money.  Just to
emphasize this, the US arms industry (owned largely by Zionists) will get
110 billion deal (bribe) from the Saudis. Kushner is very happy as are all
the rich profiteers around Donald Trump. The neoconservatives in Washington
may have some differences among themselves (hence the frenzy by the
establishment media around Russia-Trump connections). But make no mistake
about it, it is a difference as between rival gangsters. Meanwhile the
price of getting the rich richer grows in human lives. Thousands of

TEN FILMS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD,

A Cinematic Centennial Celebration of the Russian Revolution Presents

Sergei Eisenstein’s Debut Film: STRIKE / STACHKA

Los Angeles, March 13, 2017 – The Los Angeles Workers Center and Hollywood Progressive co-present the revolutionary classic Strike.

Dear Mr. Bezos,

You have recently received some radioactive junk mail promoting the idea that your company, Amazon, should financially support Perry and Davis-Besse, the two financially dead atomic reactors in northern Ohio. It was a letter from “pro-nuke environmentalists,” the ultimate oxymoron in a world moving toward safe renewables, a transition embraced by your company’s wise commitment to go 100 percent renewable.

I recently reviewed Rajko Grlić’s The Constitution, the gala screening that launched the 12th annual South East European Film Festival, writing that the Croatia-set movie “reminded me of the joy of discovering those ‘foreign’ films by Luis Bunuel, Francois Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, et al, at an arthouse that transported us beyond Hollywood glitz and glamour to a more ‘sophisticated’ cinematic view of the world beyond our shores.” I also felt this way after seeing Danish director/co-writer Thomas Vinterberg’s Copenhagen-set The Commune (Kollektivet) - although it’s not nearly as good or as much fun as the all-too-human The Constitution.  

Scandinavian cinema is a sub-set of the foreign film phenomenon. On the one hand, you have the philosophical introspection into the human condition of Bergman, his fellow Swede Victor Sjöström and Denmark-born Carl Theodor Dreyer, who confront the void and ask: “What’s it all about, anyway?”

In Moscow earlier this week I mentioned to a Russian friend that racists in my town in Virginia were chanting fascist and confederate slogans plus “Russia is our friend!” He replied: “But we never had slavery; we had serfdom.” He didn’t grasp why Russia was being grouped together with slavery.

“Trump emphasized the need to work together to end the conflict in Syria” . . . and “emphasized his desire to build a better relationship between the United States and Russia.”

While I’ve been in Russia trying to make friends, back home in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, a group of torch-bearing supporters of Robert E. Lee has held a rally generally understood as a proclamation of white supremacy.

Just back from a week in Moscow, I feel obliged to point out a few things about it.