Archive | Commentary

The health of the 79-year-old poet has deteriorated alarmingly over the past few weeks. He has been in prison since late 2018 in the Elgar Parishad case which critics say is aimed at silencing dissent in India.

On June 11, Laos (Lao People’s Democratic Republic)—a country of 7 million in Southeast Asia—said it had temporarily prevailed over COVID-19.

Those still following international relations may have noticed an unusual tearing sound growing louder. Recent developments, not conclusive or complete and yet undeniable, suggest the painful ripping apart of that eternal brotherhood between the German Federal Republic and its great patron, provider and protector, the USA.

The unchecked growth of the COVID-19 pandemic in Latin America is tearing apart the socio-economic fabric of the countrieslocated in that continent.

The Radical Reviewer and Mad Blender reviewing 17 Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey.

On 30 June 2020, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the former Belgian Congo’s independence, the news went viral over the planet: Philippe, King of the Belgians, had conveyed regrets for the colonial past, and particularly for the time when Leopold II owned the Congo as a personal possession (1885-1908), to the Congolese head of state and to the Congolese people.

CoronaShock is a term that refers to how a virus struck the world with such gripping force; it refers to how the social order in the bourgeois state crumbled, while the social order in the socialist parts of the world appeared more resilient.

The first cases of COVID-19 were detected in December 2019 in Wuhan (China). In early March, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the rapidly expanding illness a pandemic.

This essay connects police brutality to the brutality of capitalism. Capitalism has long promised a better life for people, a promise that was begrudgingly accepted by elites in the post-WWII age.

The U.S. has bought up almost all of the stock of remdesivir from Gilead, making it nearly impossible for this COVID-19 drug to be available anywhere else in the world.

If the people of Kosovo can hold the CIA-backed gangsters who murdered their people, sold their body parts and hijacked their country accountable for their crimes, is it too much to hope that Americans can do the same and hold our leaders accountable for their far more widespread and systematic war crimes?

‘The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of [Iroquois Confederacy] settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible.… the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed.’ —Commands from George Washington to General Sullivan on May 31, 1779

The defanging of the George Floyd Uprising was not accidental but was rather a deliberate attempt on the part of the American ruling class to regain social control in the wake of the largest and most militant protests in recent memory. This article examines the dimensions of how this defanging took place: how, within the space of two weeks, we went from burning down a police station to making small budgetary demands.

Most propaganda machines are not observable to the naked eye, but the military-entertainment complex hides in plain sight. Long have Hollywood and the Pentagon worked together in what has been called a relationship of “mutual exploitation,” producing war agitprop for the masses. Who is the victim amid all this exploitation?

At the 1964 Tokyo Olympics a young man born on the day of Hiroshima nuclear bombing was selected to be the last torch bearer on the relay, to signify that Japan had stood up from nuclear ruin. In an attempt to replicate the 1964 Olympic theme, the Abe government has constructed the idea of a Fukushima “revival,” a returned to normal. Exposing this illusion is an important cultural war.

As monuments to Columbus and confederate heroes topple and Democrats ponder which militarist they wish to glorify in their replacements, it is critical to realize that statues which go up are at least as important as the ones that come down. Perhaps the best nominee for a new statue is Hatuey, who led the first guerrilla warfare against European invasion of the western hemisphere.  

Venezuela’s rate of infection remains low, despite the U.S. unilateral sanctions that have denied the country the right to import drugs and tests for the population.

Taking “movement moments” to change, from the Red Summer to Black Lives Matter.

Simón Trinidad matters; his time has come. This leader of the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) faced bizarre and unfounded criminal charges in a U.S. court. He’s being held under the cruelest of conditions in a federal prison in Florence, Colorado. He will die there unless he is released. Simón Trinidad will be 70 years old on July 30.

There are immense casualties from this Great Lockdown. Incomes have collapsed for half the world’s population, while hunger rates are on the rise. But there are other casualties, other victims, often less remarked upon.