BOB RAE – Orwell’s lessons for the era of Trump: Rae

George Orwell is best known for his novels Animal Farm and 1984. Both were written toward the end of a life cut short by tuberculosis. But they came after a long period of reflection, activism, and engagement, through what one writer has called the “dark valley” of the 1920s and 30s and the death and destruction of the Second World …

Stephen Moss – Mayer Hersh obituary

Mayer Hersh, who has died aged 90, became in the last 30 years of his life one of the foremost UK-based witnesses to the Holocaust. That he had lived to tell his story at all was little short of miraculous. Hersh, whose family name was originally Herszkowicz, was a Polish Jew, born in the town of Sieradz, near Łódź, in …

URI AVNERY – The Shot Heard All Over the Country

On June 28, 1914, the Austrian heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, visited Sarajevo, the main town of Bosnia, then an Austrian province. Three young Serbian inhabitants of Bosnia had decided to assassinate him, in order to achieve the attachment of Bosnia to Serbia. They threw bombs at the car of the archduke. All three failed to harm him. Later …

Barry Lando – SHOCKED BY TRUMP? CHURCHILL WANTED TO “COLLAR THEM ALL!”

Shocked by Trump? Churchill wanted to “Collar them all” We’re outraged by Donald Trump’s demand to clamp down on all Muslim Immigration and his assertions that America’s Muslim communities must know about the radical jihadis in their midst. We’re ashamed by the memory of Roosevelt’s interning more than 100,000 Japanese American residents and citizens during World War II. But Winston …

Jon Schwarz – What Obama’s Refusal to Acknowledge the Armenian Genocide Tells Us About the U.S. — and the Rest of the World

Today, April 24, 2015, is the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Armenian Genocide. During the next several years, about one and a half million Armenians were murdered by the Ottoman Empire: shot, worked to death, or marched into the Syrian desert to starve or die of thirst. An American official who was an eyewitness wrote home, “The whole country [is] …

George Monbiot – Britain’s Mafia State

Be reasonable in response to the unreasonable: this is what voters in the Labour election are told. Accommodate, moderate, triangulate, for the alternative is to isolate yourself from reality. You might be inclined to agree. If so, please take a look at the reality to which you must submit. To an extent unknown since before the First World War, economic …

Robert Fisk – Turkey-Kurdish Conflict: Every Regional Power Has Betrayed the KurdsSo Turkish Bombing Is No Surprise

The Kurds were born to be betrayed. Almost every would-be Middle East statelet was promised freedom after the First World War, and the Kurds even sent a delegation to Versailles to ask for a nation and safe borders. But under the Treaty of Sèvres, in 1920, they got a little nation in what had been Turkey. Then along came the …

Bill Gates is celebrated in the media for the same pandemic warnings that get other people labeled ‘kooks’ by J. D. Heyes

What does the world’s richest man fear most? Something that, were someone in the alternative media to utter it, would invite ridicule and disdain. Yet few in the mainstream media bat an eye or bother to raise doubts when Microsoft founder Bill Gates says his biggest fear is a global pandemic that could swallow nations and kill tens of millions …

Blood Money: These Companies and People Make Billions of Dollars From War

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. –George Orwell The late United States Marine Corps Major GeneralSmedley D. Butler is perhaps most famous for his post-retirement speech titled “War is a Racket.” In the early 1930s, Butler presented the speech on a nationwide tour. It was so popular that he wrote …