forget – Radio Free https://www.radiofree.org Independent Media for People, Not Profits. Sat, 05 Jul 2025 15:10:45 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://www.radiofree.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/cropped-Radio-Free-Social-Icon-2-32x32.png forget – Radio Free https://www.radiofree.org 32 32 141331581 We Will Never Forget that the BBC Has Helped to Enable a genocide https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/05/we-will-never-forget-that-the-bbc-has-helped-to-enable-a-genocide-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/05/we-will-never-forget-that-the-bbc-has-helped-to-enable-a-genocide-2/#respond Sat, 05 Jul 2025 15:10:45 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=159681 A damning report has now confirmed what many of us already knew: that the BBC’s reporting of Israel’s war on Gaza is far from impartial. The Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) analysed the BBC’s coverage of the 12 months following Hamas’ one-day attack on 7 October 2023. Their huge report reveals a clear dynamic: “the marginalisation of […]

The post We Will Never Forget that the BBC Has Helped to Enable a genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> A damning report has now confirmed what many of us already knew: that the BBC’s reporting of Israel’s war on Gaza is far from impartial.

The Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) analysed the BBC’s coverage of the 12 months following Hamas’ one-day attack on 7 October 2023. Their huge report reveals a clear dynamic: “the marginalisation of Palestinian suffering and the amplification of Israeli narratives.”

The report showed that, despite the killing of 34 times more Palestinians, the BBC gave Israeli deaths 33 times more coverage, interviewed more than twice as many Israelis as Palestinians (1,085 v 2,350), and shared the Israeli perspective 11 times more frequently than the Palestinian one (2,340 v 217).

Complicit in genocide

The report, which examined over 35,000 pieces of content produced by “the world’s most trusted broadcaster,” is full of similarly shocking evidence. But perhaps the most deplorable is the BBC’s failure to report confessions of genocidal intent by Israel’s leaders. Not a single BBC article reported Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu’s biblical “Amalek” reference – a people the Jews were commanded by God to annihilate – or president Herzog’s claim of Palestinian collective responsibility. Just 12 out of 3,873 articles bothered to mention former defence minister Gallant’s statement in which he referred to Palestinians as “human animals”, ordered “a complete siege on the Gaza strip”, and promised “we will eliminate everything”. Genocidal intent is notoriously difficult to prove when classifying an act as genocide, yet here are Israel’s own leaders, readily admitting their intention to wipe out an entire people.

Peter Oborne, one of several journalists to question the BBC about the findings in the report during a parliamentary meeting, said: “You never educated your audience about the genocidal remarks, and according to this report, on one hundred occasions, one hundred occasions, you’ve closed down the references to genocide by your guests. This makes you complicit.”

Lack of crucial context

Oborne’s brilliant tirade, which can be viewed here, also flagged the BBC’s failure to report on two Israeli military doctrines – the Hannibal directive and the Dayiha doctrine – which provide essential context to understanding Israel’s response to the 7 October attacks.

The Hannibal directive allows the Israeli military to use any force necessary to prevent its soldiers from being captured and taken into enemy territory – even if that means opening fire on those captives. A major investigation by Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed that the procedure was activated during the 7 October attacks, and a UN report concluded that at least 14 Israeli civilians were deliberately killed by their own army on that day as a result of the directive. But as Israel refused to cooperate with the UN investigation – and barred medical professionals and others from doing so – we do not know the true figure. A year-long investigation by Electronic Intifada, however, found it to be in the hundreds.

The BBC has also never mentioned Israel’s Dahiya doctrine. Named after a Beirut suburb that was decimated by Israel in 2006, the Dahiya doctrine is the use of disproportionate force to destroy civilians and everything that supports them so that they will never again contemplate resistance. It is a form of collective punishment – and unquestionably a war crime – that has been applied to Gaza over the past 20 months. The BBC’s decision not to ever mention this doctrine is, as Oborne calls it, “a grotesque omission”, for it provides fundamental context to Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza following 7 October.

No desire to change

You only have to look at the representative the BBC chose to respond to the accusations in the report and defend its Gaza coverage to see how little it cares – and how unlikely it is to change. Richard Burgess, executive news editor at the BBC, admitted he’s “not a Middle East expert” and doesn’t claim to understand the doctrines. A rightly exasperated Oborne responded, “Then send someone along who does!” When a senior news editor is asked to justify their organisation’s coverage of what is widely considered a genocide, ignorance of the full facts is truly an appalling defense.

Soon after the report was released – as if to demonstrate its complete unwillingness to modify its pattern of bias – the BBC announced that its long-awaited documentary, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, would not be aired. The film explores the systematic destruction of Gaza’s health service by Israeli forces as well as the abuse suffered by Palestinian medics. The BBC claimed that broadcasting the film could create “a perception of partiality”. But as former BBC journalist and news presenter Karishma Patel tweeted: “How? This film shows the reality of Israel’s actions. You can’t fling the accusation of bias at realities you simply don’t want on air.” Just as the harrowing documentary on life in Gaza seen through the eyes of Palestinian children was pulled by the BBC months previously, the BBC’s silencing of Palestinian voices appears to be institutional. It’s simply what it does.

Israel apologists

And just when you think it couldn’t get any worse, it does. On 27 June, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a horrific article about the Gaza Health Foundation (GHF) – the controversial Israeli-controlled aid distribution centres. The IDF soldiers Haaretz interviewed confirmed what Palestinians have been claiming for weeks: that soldiers are being ordered to massacre desperate, starving civilians queuing up for food. “It’s a killing field,” one soldier said. “Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They’re treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars.” Another added, “Sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there’s no danger to the forces…I’m not aware of a single instance of return fire.”

Did the BBC pick up on this story? Of course it didn’t. It did however publish an ‘explainer’ about the shootings at GHF sites via its Verify service. BBC Verify calls itself a “specialist team of journalists” who “fact-check information, verify video, counter disinformation, and analyse data to separate fact from fake.” But rather than using actual testimony from IDF soldiers to corroborate reports of shootings, their specialist journalists looked at some video footage and concluded that they paint a murky picture: “While the videos show an overall picture of danger and chaos, they do not definitively show who is responsible for firing.”

The rest of the article reads like a PR piece for the government of Israel: Israeli government spokesman David Mencer is quoted saying that the reports of hundreds of civilians being killed is “another untruth”; Hamas are of course likely responsible; while a GHF spokesperson is “pleased” with its first month of operations. We know the BBC Verify journalists will have read the Haaretz article. That they chose to completely ignore it and concoct this pile of Israel apologia is frankly appalling.

The truth is coming out

The BBC obviously has no intention of reforming and will continue to provide cover for Israel’s crimes for as long as it possibly can. But despite their best efforts, the truth about Israel is finding its way out. The documentary that the BBC refused to air has now found a home on Channel 4 in the UK and on Zeteo News worldwide. And the BBC’s attempt to control their Glastonbury coverage by barring pro-Palestinian band Kneecap from their live broadcast, failed spectacularly when punk duo Bob Vylan chose to use their set to condemn Israel’s war crimes, live on air. Lead singer Bobby called out the UK and US for being “complicit in war crimes” and led chants of “free Palestine” and “death to the IDF”, which the crowd enthusiastically shouted back. The crowd’s response, and the fact that a huge number of other artists also spoke out in support of Palestine, suggests the tide is shifting.

True to form, the BBC swiftly removed Bob Vylan’s performance from iPlayer and released a grovelling statement expressing regret that it hadn’t pulled the live stream and describing Vylan’s words as “deeply offensive” and “utterly unacceptable.” That our state broadcaster is so quick to condemn words but ignores a massacre of unarmed civilians tells you everything you need to know about the BBC – and you can’t help but sense that it is losing control of the narrative. Anyone with any conscience simply cannot agree that calling out a genocide is worse than committing one.

History will not be kind to the genocide enablers. And thanks to reports like CfMM’s, we will always remember on whose side the BBC stood.

The post We Will Never Forget that the BBC Has Helped to Enable a genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Sylvia Monkhouse.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/05/we-will-never-forget-that-the-bbc-has-helped-to-enable-a-genocide-2/feed/ 0 543002 We Will Never Forget that the BBC Has Helped to Enable a genocide https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/05/we-will-never-forget-that-the-bbc-has-helped-to-enable-a-genocide/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/05/we-will-never-forget-that-the-bbc-has-helped-to-enable-a-genocide/#respond Sat, 05 Jul 2025 15:10:45 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=159681 A damning report has now confirmed what many of us already knew: that the BBC’s reporting of Israel’s war on Gaza is far from impartial. The Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) analysed the BBC’s coverage of the 12 months following Hamas’ one-day attack on 7 October 2023. Their huge report reveals a clear dynamic: “the marginalisation of […]

The post We Will Never Forget that the BBC Has Helped to Enable a genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> A damning report has now confirmed what many of us already knew: that the BBC’s reporting of Israel’s war on Gaza is far from impartial.

The Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) analysed the BBC’s coverage of the 12 months following Hamas’ one-day attack on 7 October 2023. Their huge report reveals a clear dynamic: “the marginalisation of Palestinian suffering and the amplification of Israeli narratives.”

The report showed that, despite the killing of 34 times more Palestinians, the BBC gave Israeli deaths 33 times more coverage, interviewed more than twice as many Israelis as Palestinians (1,085 v 2,350), and shared the Israeli perspective 11 times more frequently than the Palestinian one (2,340 v 217).

Complicit in genocide

The report, which examined over 35,000 pieces of content produced by “the world’s most trusted broadcaster,” is full of similarly shocking evidence. But perhaps the most deplorable is the BBC’s failure to report confessions of genocidal intent by Israel’s leaders. Not a single BBC article reported Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu’s biblical “Amalek” reference – a people the Jews were commanded by God to annihilate – or president Herzog’s claim of Palestinian collective responsibility. Just 12 out of 3,873 articles bothered to mention former defence minister Gallant’s statement in which he referred to Palestinians as “human animals”, ordered “a complete siege on the Gaza strip”, and promised “we will eliminate everything”. Genocidal intent is notoriously difficult to prove when classifying an act as genocide, yet here are Israel’s own leaders, readily admitting their intention to wipe out an entire people.

Peter Oborne, one of several journalists to question the BBC about the findings in the report during a parliamentary meeting, said: “You never educated your audience about the genocidal remarks, and according to this report, on one hundred occasions, one hundred occasions, you’ve closed down the references to genocide by your guests. This makes you complicit.”

Lack of crucial context

Oborne’s brilliant tirade, which can be viewed here, also flagged the BBC’s failure to report on two Israeli military doctrines – the Hannibal directive and the Dayiha doctrine – which provide essential context to understanding Israel’s response to the 7 October attacks.

The Hannibal directive allows the Israeli military to use any force necessary to prevent its soldiers from being captured and taken into enemy territory – even if that means opening fire on those captives. A major investigation by Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed that the procedure was activated during the 7 October attacks, and a UN report concluded that at least 14 Israeli civilians were deliberately killed by their own army on that day as a result of the directive. But as Israel refused to cooperate with the UN investigation – and barred medical professionals and others from doing so – we do not know the true figure. A year-long investigation by Electronic Intifada, however, found it to be in the hundreds.

The BBC has also never mentioned Israel’s Dahiya doctrine. Named after a Beirut suburb that was decimated by Israel in 2006, the Dahiya doctrine is the use of disproportionate force to destroy civilians and everything that supports them so that they will never again contemplate resistance. It is a form of collective punishment – and unquestionably a war crime – that has been applied to Gaza over the past 20 months. The BBC’s decision not to ever mention this doctrine is, as Oborne calls it, “a grotesque omission”, for it provides fundamental context to Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza following 7 October.

No desire to change

You only have to look at the representative the BBC chose to respond to the accusations in the report and defend its Gaza coverage to see how little it cares – and how unlikely it is to change. Richard Burgess, executive news editor at the BBC, admitted he’s “not a Middle East expert” and doesn’t claim to understand the doctrines. A rightly exasperated Oborne responded, “Then send someone along who does!” When a senior news editor is asked to justify their organisation’s coverage of what is widely considered a genocide, ignorance of the full facts is truly an appalling defense.

Soon after the report was released – as if to demonstrate its complete unwillingness to modify its pattern of bias – the BBC announced that its long-awaited documentary, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, would not be aired. The film explores the systematic destruction of Gaza’s health service by Israeli forces as well as the abuse suffered by Palestinian medics. The BBC claimed that broadcasting the film could create “a perception of partiality”. But as former BBC journalist and news presenter Karishma Patel tweeted: “How? This film shows the reality of Israel’s actions. You can’t fling the accusation of bias at realities you simply don’t want on air.” Just as the harrowing documentary on life in Gaza seen through the eyes of Palestinian children was pulled by the BBC months previously, the BBC’s silencing of Palestinian voices appears to be institutional. It’s simply what it does.

Israel apologists

And just when you think it couldn’t get any worse, it does. On 27 June, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a horrific article about the Gaza Health Foundation (GHF) – the controversial Israeli-controlled aid distribution centres. The IDF soldiers Haaretz interviewed confirmed what Palestinians have been claiming for weeks: that soldiers are being ordered to massacre desperate, starving civilians queuing up for food. “It’s a killing field,” one soldier said. “Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They’re treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars.” Another added, “Sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there’s no danger to the forces…I’m not aware of a single instance of return fire.”

Did the BBC pick up on this story? Of course it didn’t. It did however publish an ‘explainer’ about the shootings at GHF sites via its Verify service. BBC Verify calls itself a “specialist team of journalists” who “fact-check information, verify video, counter disinformation, and analyse data to separate fact from fake.” But rather than using actual testimony from IDF soldiers to corroborate reports of shootings, their specialist journalists looked at some video footage and concluded that they paint a murky picture: “While the videos show an overall picture of danger and chaos, they do not definitively show who is responsible for firing.”

The rest of the article reads like a PR piece for the government of Israel: Israeli government spokesman David Mencer is quoted saying that the reports of hundreds of civilians being killed is “another untruth”; Hamas are of course likely responsible; while a GHF spokesperson is “pleased” with its first month of operations. We know the BBC Verify journalists will have read the Haaretz article. That they chose to completely ignore it and concoct this pile of Israel apologia is frankly appalling.

The truth is coming out

The BBC obviously has no intention of reforming and will continue to provide cover for Israel’s crimes for as long as it possibly can. But despite their best efforts, the truth about Israel is finding its way out. The documentary that the BBC refused to air has now found a home on Channel 4 in the UK and on Zeteo News worldwide. And the BBC’s attempt to control their Glastonbury coverage by barring pro-Palestinian band Kneecap from their live broadcast, failed spectacularly when punk duo Bob Vylan chose to use their set to condemn Israel’s war crimes, live on air. Lead singer Bobby called out the UK and US for being “complicit in war crimes” and led chants of “free Palestine” and “death to the IDF”, which the crowd enthusiastically shouted back. The crowd’s response, and the fact that a huge number of other artists also spoke out in support of Palestine, suggests the tide is shifting.

True to form, the BBC swiftly removed Bob Vylan’s performance from iPlayer and released a grovelling statement expressing regret that it hadn’t pulled the live stream and describing Vylan’s words as “deeply offensive” and “utterly unacceptable.” That our state broadcaster is so quick to condemn words but ignores a massacre of unarmed civilians tells you everything you need to know about the BBC – and you can’t help but sense that it is losing control of the narrative. Anyone with any conscience simply cannot agree that calling out a genocide is worse than committing one.

History will not be kind to the genocide enablers. And thanks to reports like CfMM’s, we will always remember on whose side the BBC stood.

The post We Will Never Forget that the BBC Has Helped to Enable a genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Sylvia Monkhouse.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/07/05/we-will-never-forget-that-the-bbc-has-helped-to-enable-a-genocide/feed/ 0 543001 Militant Neo-Pagans Neither Forgive nor Forget https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/06/militant-neo-pagans-neither-forgive-nor-forget/ https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/06/militant-neo-pagans-neither-forgive-nor-forget/#respond Sun, 06 Apr 2025 17:12:28 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=157193 Orientation Christianity’s sinister past against Paganism The very first commandment in the Bible says “I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have strange gods before me”. These Pagan Gods are claimed to be either unreal or false. Pagan statues were therefore fair game to be destroyed or desecrated. The story of the Christian destruction […]

The post Militant Neo-Pagans Neither Forgive nor Forget first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]>

Orientation

Christianity’s sinister past against Paganism
The very first commandment in the Bible says “I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have strange gods before me”. These Pagan Gods are claimed to be either unreal or false. Pagan statues were therefore fair game to be destroyed or desecrated. The story of the Christian destruction of the Greco-Roman Pagan world has been told by Robin Lane Fox in Pagans and Christians; Jonathan Kirsch, God Against the Gods; Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of The Classical World and Helen Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History. There is no secret about the horrible Inquisition of the Catholic Church against heretics such as Bruno and Galileo. Lastly, feminists have made us very aware of the burning of the witches, both in Europe and in the United States in Salem Massachusetts although there is controversy over how many women were killed.

The variety of ways Pagans react to Christianity’s sinister past
How do Neo-Pagans react to these historical events? As we might expect there is a full spectrum of reactions. The more militant feminists see all the monotheist “Religions of the Book” as their enemy, not just Christianity. The whole of “patriarchy” is the problem. Z Budapest and Monica Sjöö are examples of the more militant type. These heavy hitters do not want to make nice with Christianity and mix Paganism with any monotheistic beliefs or rituals. At the other extreme there are those Neo-Pagans who want to fight for Paganism to be included as a world religion and join the Parliament of the World’s Religions. Michael York’s book Pagan Theology is an example of this. In the middle there are Neo-Pagans who are basically Pagans but want to eclectically draw selectively from aspects of monotheist religion of the liberal type. River and Joyce Higginbotham in their book Pagan Spirituality are examples of this.

Where are we going?
Part of this article is a defense of militant Neo-Paganism against the more compromising positions. I say Pagans should be anti-Christian. Neo-Paganism will be compared to Christianity across thirty categories. The second part of this piece is about why Neo-Pagans should also be anti-capitalists. I will compare Neo-Paganism to capitalism across the same thirty categories. I will close this article by showing the close relationship between monotheism and capitalism across thirteen categories.

The Fundamental Opposition Between Neo-Paganism and Christianity
Patriarchal foundations of Christianity
Suppose we give the more compromising Neo-Pagans the benefit of the doubt for the sake of argument and let’s say we should forget the monstrous history of Christianity and try to work out a relationship with Christianity in the present. What this doesn’t consider is that Christianity is diametrically opposed to Paganism on ontological and epistemological grounds. For one thing, Paganism has had long historical periods in which it was centered in societies which were matrifocal though not matriarchal. It’s true that Poly-Theism existed in patriarchal societies as well, but there has never been a monotheistic society in which there was a matrifocal organization of descent or residency. Monotheism has been fundamentally opposed to gender equality.

Transcendental Nature of God
Secondly, the Pagan tradition has a history of the gods and goddesses as immanent in the world. Nature creates and recreates herself from within, without any extra-cosmic “butt-inskies” intervening. Nature is sacred. Christianity, on the other hand is foundationally a transcendental religion. Its God is above and beyond other worldly beings and sucks the sacredness out of the world. God shoots his wad before time and creates the world in a single act over seven days. But this leads to contradictions since God has to intervene periodically into history to fix what he botched.

Nature is imperfect and passive
God creates nature, nature does not create God. Nature is fallen and passive and receives its marching orders directly from God. Humanity is given the job of having dominion over nature. Nature is marginalized, a distraction at best, a temptress at worst.

God demands worship and obedience
Whether in animism or polytheism in all Paganism, reciprocity between humanity and the earth spirits, totems, ancestors, goddesses and gods, reciprocity is the name of the game. The gods and goddesses are not all-powerful and all-knowing and are somewhat dependent on humanity. This is the basis of magic. They are hardly in a position to demand obedience. For Christianity, God is worshipped. To worship is a one-way relationship going from humanity to God. God does not want nor need reciprocity. God acts arbitrarily in the case of the Jews and the Protestants. He causes suffering yet has to answer to no one.

Christian understands opposites as dualistic, mutually exclusive
For Pagans, all the spirits, totems, ancestors, gods and goddesses have strengths and weakness. There are no beings that are all good or all bad. For Pagans opposites are polar, they can turn into each other, creating new emergent synthesis.  Christianity, on the other hand, creates absolute opposites of an all-good God who is all powerful, knowing and loving. But Christianity creates another being which is absolutely evil – Satan. Because of this Christianity has a difficult time providing guidance for human life which is too complex to be put into absolutist blocks.

God of Christianity is a warring, jealous, intolerant god
It is certainly true that there have been wars in animistic and polytheist societies, but these societies never went to war over religion. Neither were these sacred sources intolerant of each other. In general, when Pagan societies encountered other spiritual beings, they either tried to see the commonalties with their beings or simply added them to the pantheon. Their philosophy was kind of “the more the merrier”. The entire history of Christianity, on the contrary has been marred by religious wars between monotheist religions, intolerance of heretics, persecutions and fanaticism of witches that has no parallel in Paganism.

Christianity understands humanity has fallen and is in need of faith
There is no such thing as original sin in Paganism. People certainly have failings but as individuals. However, there was no mark of failure that condemned the entire species. In addition, Paganism was an experiential religion. People practiced magic and sometimes it seemed to work and sometimes it didn’t but no faith in the sacred powers was required. The goddesses and gods had to be persuaded or lured but the reciprocity made faith meaningless and irrelevant. For Christianity we have the Adam and Eve tale of original sin. Humanity was cursed and was lucky to be alive. God could do whatever He wanted and humanity was expected to have faith that in the end God would show some mercy.

Most Christianity must hollow out intermediate beings

Pagan loyalties are both close at hand and far away. Furthermore, there is rarely a hierarchical relationship among sacred beings. There are earth-spirits, totems, ancestor spirits, culture heroes, goddesses and gods and each covers an expanding range of responsibility. However, gods and goddesses don’t tell earth-spirits or ancestors what to do. They each exist in an expanding plurality. In the case of Christianity, not only is there a hierarchical relationship between God and humanity, but God must wipe out all Pagan intermediaries in the extreme case of the Protestants and the Jews. For them it is the human individual, God and the Bible. Catholicism does allow intermediaries such as angels or saints, provided they are subordinate to God.

Christianity aspires to spiritual imperialism
Pagan societies at the tribal level have always been local and decentralized. Polytheistic state civilizations have been centralized politically but there is not a single centralized Pagan tradition in those societies. Usually, the peasants practiced their own kind of “earth magic” while those in the cities practiced a more urban polytheism. But even the rulers of polytheistic state civilizations did not proselytize their religion or send out missionaries. If they conquered other societies, they simply expected the subjugated population to respect their gods and goddesses while pretty much leaving subordinated groups alone to practice their own traditions. It is Christianity that began to proselytize once it gained state power, sending out missionaries in the hopes of converting everyone worthy of becoming Christian. Just as for Christians, God is imagined to be everywhere in the spiritual universe, so Christianity on earth must also be everywhere conquering the entire globe.

Table 1 contains a more exhaustive list of contracts between Paganism and Christianity. I have drawn this list from Jordan Paper’s book The Deities are Many.

Christianity as a slave religion of sick weaklings filled with resentment

At least among philosophers, I can’t think of a stronger critic of Christianity than Fredrich Nietzsche. He famously announced that “God is dead”. Unfortunately, some have interpreted this as meaning Nietzsche was some kind of atheist. Given Nietzsche’s love of the Greeks and what he imagined as early German Pagan culture, he should have said, “God is dead. Long live the gods!”. Nietzsche rightly criticized Christianity as a slave religion, a religion of a “domesticated animals, herd animals, a sick animal”. When we look at the history of Christianity it has been a history of followers, and a religion that justified oppression for the overwhelming period of its history. What did he mean by a calling Christians sick animals? Many things. For one it is a religion of passivity, a religion that gets its followers used to meekly following orders rather than seeking out spiritual experience, as he said, dancing on the slopes of Vesuvius. Christianity attempts to get people used to pining for pie in the sky waiting for them when they die.

It is also sick because it is a religion which makes a virtue out of being weak. Nietzsche says somewhere I love to see those without any claws making a virtue out of being clawless while condemning health and strength as a vice and something to be stamped out. Nietzsche said that Christian parasites in power make an ideal out of whatever contradicts self-preservation, pleasure, joy and most everything we Neo-Pagans stand for.

Nietzsche discussed resentment as the psychology of Christians. The psychology of resentment makes a virtue of wishing ill on other people while envying what they have. Nietzsche had no patience with Buddhism’s attempting to starve out desire or meditating it away. He thinks it is far braver to have like a Centaur’s desire without the desires having us. We supersede our desires; we don’t transcend them. To transcend means to be above and superior to our desires, being beyond and fundamentally unlike them.  On the other hand, to supersede desires is to fully indulge them yet wanting more, and having wings to ride them into a higher dimension. Nietzsche saw Christianity as a war of the botched against the fit. A war of slander against the here and now. Any creature who would need faith and prayer is corrupted by the virus of Christianity.

I hope I have convinced you Neo-Pagans that I have made a good case that we need not wander into Christianity imagining they have something we lack. Both historically, ontologically and epistemologically it is against everything we stand for. I will now take on objections from Neo-Pagans who want to take a softer line.

What can Christianity Possibly Offer Neo-Pagans to Make Us Think Twice? 

An identification with western esoteric vs exoteric spirituality

Some Neo-Pagans might say that militant Neo-Pagans are too extreme. For one thing, there are liberal Christians who would themselves criticize the history of Christianity and be sympathetic to Neo-Pagans. New Age spirituality makes a distinction between esoteric and exoteric spirituality. They contend that at their best, all world religions are good and all the world religions take different paths to the same end. This commonality across religions is known to only the few, and this comparative understanding of religion is called the perennial philosophy or esoteric spirituality.  Transpersonal psychologist and comparative religion scholar Ken Wilber in his books Up from Eden and Sex, Ecology, Evolutionexemplify this esoteric vs exoteric spirituality. The Theosophy of Madame Blavatsky and the Anthroposophy of Rudolph Steiner are more historical examples.

On the other hand, exoteric religion is the religion of the masses. It is the leaders of exoteric religions who are responsible for all the religious wars between the religions of the book as well as Catholic and Protestant attacks on Paganism. So esoteric New Age spiritualists hold out the olive leaf to Neo-Pagans, welcoming us in. Why not take the leaf? For one thing the perennial philosophy is a synthesis of universalistic religions which include Eastern religions/philosophies like Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and Confucianism. They are all patriarchal religions and as I have tried to show the Pagan world view is diametrically opposed to them.

Furthermore, those who support the perennial philosophy are people from upper middle-class backgrounds. This is only about 10% of the population. In the United States 14% do not identity with any religious heritage. The overwhelming majority of middle-class and especially working-class people – 75% of the population – identify with either the moderate or fundamental spectrum of monotheism. So, the characteristics of monotheistic Christianity on the right side of Table I are accurate for most Christians.

Pragmatic considerations of a lack of stable public space
In addition, we militant Neo-Pagans have to admit that we do not have any public space for regular practices. At least in Yankeedom, there are no Pagan temples in which we can hold rituals and ceremonies. The Unitarian Universalists now offer Neo-Pagans a free space to use in the church and be part of it. It is tempting, yet for militant Neo-Pagans there are class issues. The Unitarians are among the wealthiest of the Protestant churches in the United States. For militant Neo-Pagans who are socialists – whether anarchist or Marxists – mixing with the upper classes raises contradictions. The problem of lack of stable public space means that for those who are not solitary Pagans, at the local level covens will continue to be held in private homes. At a regional level, while conferences and seasonal festivals have been very successful in state parks and private campsites, we still have no place to call home.

Legal protection
In the United States, Neo-Paganism has flourished from the late 1970s to today. For the most part we have been left alone by the Catholic, Protestant and Zionist authorities. However, all these religions have seen a decline in their numbers. At least one of the reasons for this is people, especially women, have left it for Neo-Paganism. Especially in the era of Trump 2.0, Neo-Pagans have good reason to fear a new kind of persecution from Catholic and Protestant fundamentalists. This is why some Neo-Pagan groups want to apply for legal status to protect themselves from harassment. But militant Neo-Pagans are concerned that preoccupation with legal standing will conservatize the movement and drain its radical, in-your-face edge way of life. In addition, living in a steeply declining civilization such as the United States, economic and political insecurity can make life much harder for Neo-Pagans that it has already been.

Civil disobedience
A more militant approach is to organize now to prepare for an attack rather than waiting until it happens and then operating in reactive mode. The more radical wing of Paganism such as Starhawk’s Reclaiming group has lots of experience with organizing Pagans into political protests using the methods of civil disobedience. These strategies and tactics could be transferred to standing-ready groups in dealing with Christian nationalists. Neo-Pagans would do well to make alliances with atheists and secularist groups such as Freedom from Religion. This group is very well organized and consists of lawyers and lay folk who defend the Constitution against Christian nationalists who try to cross the line in the separation of Church and state. They have a monthly newspaper and hold conferences once or twice a year.

Armed conflict

As citizens of the United States, we are allowed to bear arms. Most of the time people think of this as something individuals do. But there is nothing to help Pagan groups protect themselves against Christians collectively if they are attacked. Usually, liberal Pagans get nervous with talks about group arming. Also, people think that this kind of thing is inherently a right-wing activity that might be associated with the Nordic Paganism, some of whom have a racist orientation. However, there is another left-wing organization called Redneck Revolt which is anti-racist and appeals to working-class whites who are Socialists. They believe in protecting working-class people collectively. Read here for more information about them. There is certainly a lot to learn from them in applying their organizational skills to Neo-Pagan circumstances.

What I have said so far is that Neo-Pagans should keep their distance from Christianity for theoretical reasons and practical reasons. But suppose you continue to object. Ok, I will make one concession

A twelve-step program for Christians to join the Neo-Pagan community 

In my opinion some Neo-Pagans are far too accommodating of former Christians who want to jump on the Neo-Pagan bandwagon. They should be required to go through the equivalent of a 12-step program in order to have a chance at being part of a Neo-Pagan community. They should be required to read at least two books about the history of what Christianity has done to Pagans, one for the ancient world and one on Christian attacks on witchcraft. As part of their initiation, they should be required to respond a list of questions. The third process they should enact is to write down the history of any harm they might have done to Neo-Pagans in the past including any high-school encounters. The fourth is to, as much as possible, track those people down who have been harmed and make amends. Next, as part a public ritual they should make a public apology to the entire Neo-Pagan community. Finally, they should be given some volunteer work within the Neo-Pagan community to do such as making phone calls, mailing newsletters or driving equipment around to Pagan events. This would relieve the burden from committed Neo-Pagan leaders who are probably overworked and underpaid for the time they put into their organization.

Table 1 Paganism vs Monotheism (Christianity)

Paganism Category of comparison Monotheism (Christianity)
Matrifocal cultures developed polytheism Matriarchy vs patriarchy No matrifocal cultures ever developed monotheism
No record of a monotheistic Goddess theology until contemporary feminism
Never celebrated celibacy Place of celibacy Catholic and Buddhist priests are celibate
Many truths Tolerance Single truth can produce intolerance. No grey areas
No heresies. Experiential Heresies Based on creeds – heresies prevalent
Generally, the gods and goddesses are not jealous of each other Jealousy Yahweh is jealous
No Persecution Yes. Ex-communication
Christianity went from a persecuting minority to a persecuting majority
No Fanaticism Yes. Destroying the Alexandrian library, smashing of idols (Protestants)
No wars over beliefs Wars Religious wars over beliefs
Cyclic Time orientation Linear time
Sacred Earth and nature Marginalized – desacralized
Ongoing creativity in time and space How frequently is creativity used Creative in a single act before time
Many directions: horizontal Directions Single vertical direction
Heaven above, Hell below
No original sin other than human selfishness Original sin Yes. Inheritor of Adam and Eve’s sin
Opposites are polar and change into each other The Nature of opposites Dualistically separated and going in opposite directions
No. All gods and goddesses have their pros and cons Distribution of virtues and vices God absolute god
Satan absolute evil
Reciprocity, respect, reverence How is the sacred engaged Worship, obedience
Looked down upon
Wealth is land based – foragers, horticulturalists, agriculturalists		 Place or misplace of commerce Made room for it
Originated among Greece, Phoenicians. Herders
Christianity spread in port cities In Turkey
Islam spread along the caravan routes of Central Asia
Catholics in Venice
No proselyting, no missionaries Outreach Proselytizing, missionaries
Decentralized – Paleo-Pagan
Centralized – Meso-Pagan
Decentralized – Neo-Pagan		 Coordinated effort Centralization once they had power
Local, regional at most Spatial reach Global, everywhere
Ancestors are very important among horticulturalists
(reverence)		 Place of the ancestors Not very important
Social situations when the family was embarrassed Shame vs guilt Guilt was not group focused

Individual God
Guilt is continuous and unending
Gods are not all-powerful or all-knowing Degree of power God is all powerful
God knows all
Meaningless and irrelevant Faith Meaningful, necessary and relevant
Mediums are ongoing and a way of life – women
About past, present and future		 Intermediaries Only under extraordinary events
Prophesy – men
About the past
No origin. World is eternal
cyclic, steady state		 Origin of universe World has origin
Big bang
Myths change over time Stability of myths Myths are fixed and unchanging over time
Tricksters, playful and prevalent Place of trickers These stories exist in West they are not numinous. They can be associated with evil as with horror — or cartoon characters
Deities that are numinous – are serious about sobriety

Neo-Paganism vs Capitalism
Merchants and artisans are not capitalists
In this section I will give many reasons why Neo-Paganism should want nothing to do with capitalism. But does this mean Neo-Pagans should be socialists? Yes, but I will not make the case in this article. Many Neo-Pagans are justifiably cautious about socialism if they think socialists want the state to be in charge of all economic exchanges. They fear socialists will deprive them of their livelihood. After all, many Neo-Pagans have found their new identity from inhabiting Neo-Pagan bookstores. The owners of these bookstores and occult magic stores are merchants. Furthermore, a solid core of Neo-Pagans are artisans who make jewelry, craft calendars and make sculptures of gods and goddesses.

From our point of view merchants, artisans and craftsmen are not capitalists. Markets and artisans existed all the way back to simple horticulture societies long before capitalism existed. Industrial capitalism is the private ownership of natural resources, methods of harnessing energy, tools and power settings (politics) where decisions are made about what to produce and how to produce it. These forms of capitalism include agricultural capitalism (slavery), industrial capitalism, finance capitalism and military capitalism. It is these that Neo-Pagans should be against. But how is capitalism the deadly enemy of Neo-Paganism?

No reciprocity and infinite exploitation
The heart of Neo-Paganism is that the relationship with the sacred powers is reciprocation. It is the basis of sympathetic magic. Our relationship is based on respect and reverence between us and our totems, ancestors, gods and goddesses. The gods and goddesses do not take and take and take. That would lead to breakdown. But under capitalism there are no lawful expectations that capitalists must give back. They are free to exploit as much as they can get away with. It is true eventually capitalism cannot go on this way and the results are either economic depressions or revolutions. So, workers are in the long run sometimes compensated.  But this happens socially, unconsciously. It is not something that is built into the system of capitalism by capitalists. Workers may be reciprocated but in spite of capitalists.

Capitalist idolatry
In spite of Christian propaganda, Pagans do not idolize our gods and goddesses. Sacred powers are generally understood as fluid, moving and changing. We don’t treat these sacred powers in a Platonic way where spirits are essences, Platonic ideals which are frozen and changeless. In Neo-Paganism there is little in the way of reification, in which gods take on a life of their own, where the tools or objects used are reified. It is true that some of the more superficial tendencies in Paganism might reify magical tools and treat them as ends in themselves. But this is true of any common superstition, not unique to Paganism.

However, the entire capitalist system is based on idolatry of commodities and money. In the first volume of Capital, Marx talks about the idolatrous relationship between workers and the commodities we make. Instead of commodities being used as means to consume and improve life, we reify commodities until they become ends in themselves. We become enslaved to our commodities and live through the possession of them. As Marx says, things are in the saddle. Commerce is unhinged and everything is for sale.

Secondly, money becomes a fetish instead of a means to gain commodities. In the merchant phase of capitalism, money is used as a medium to facilitate the exchange of commodities. But under the industrial phase of capitalism money changes from a means to an end to an end in itself. Money is invested in commodities, not to use the commodities but as a means to make more money. Money becomes fetishized as capital. These reifications can be tracked in our language as when we hear phrases like “money talks’ or “let your money grow” as if money were a part of organic life. Lastly, under finance capital, capital is used to make more capital and becomes completely unhinged from social life. Derivatives and stock options are reified monsters who dictate social life. The stock markets are the houses of idolatry where the traders pay homage to Mammon.

Capitalism is imprisoned in dualistic opposites
As I said in the section on monotheism opposites, Neo-Paganism understands opposites as polar, as turning into each other and as mutually co-creative. Under capitalism opposites are understood as mutually exclusive opposites:

  • Workers vs capitalists
  • Capitalists vs communists
  • Hardworking, thrifty, shrewd capitalists vs lazy, ignorant workers

But more importantly, capitalists do not understand the contradictory nature of their system. They image their system can go on forever. Capitalists image that their significant problems about every seven years are “businesses cycles” which are self-correcting. They deny that capitalism has accumulating contradictions, which past a certain point will either degenerate into a lower order or be transformed into a higher system, a qualitative leap. As Rosa Luxemburg once said, “it’s either socialism or barbarism”. Marxist crisis theorists present various ways in which the system will end. David Harvey in his book The Seventeen Contradictions of Capitalism lays this out beautifully.

Capitalists Must Destroy Intermediaries
As I said earlier in our discussion of spiritual intermediaries, for Pagan intermediaries are welcome and they expand seemingly without limit and without a hierarchical relationship between them. At the origin of capitalism, merchants had to compete with feudal economic exchanges which cut across political intermediaries such as kingdoms, provinces, principalities and city states. Over the last 500 years capitalist used nation-states to hollow out or eliminate these political intermediaries. They used the nation-state to climb under, around and through kingdoms and provinces so that capitalist exchanges through coined money was the only game in town. Then under global capitalism the organization of societies into nation-states becomes hollowed out so that whole continents (the European Union) began to undermine nation-states.

Capitalist have overreach in spatial scale
As I said earlier, Paganism’s spatial reach is decentralized and local. Capitalists, however know no spatial limits. It first expands into nation-states but when it runs into problems in making a profit within its home nation-state it expands beyond it. There are problems within nation-states either because there is competition between capitalists in other nation-states or because its domestic workers are getting more organized to fight exploitation through unions or revolutions. They keep expanding across the globe, subjugating societies as they grow toward imperialism.

Exploitation of Nature
Just as capitalists know no limit in the exploitation of other societies, so in the biophysical world it exploits nature without limits. The result of ecological pollution is extreme weather, desertification of lands, species growing extinct, feedback systems in nature that run amuck. Instead of replenishing and repairing, we hear capitalists treating the consequences of their attack on biophysical nature as “externalities” which they see as separate from economic exchange.

Please see Table two for a full comparison between Neo-Paganism and Capitalism at the end of this article.

Table 2 Neo-Paganism vs Capitalism

Neo-Paganism Category of comparison Capitalism

 
Matrifocal cultures developed polytheism Matriarchy vs patriarchy

 

 Continues patriarchy with some presence of feminism
Never celebrated celibacy Place of celibacy Doesn’t supply celibacy
No money to be made from it
Many truths Tolerance Cannot tolerate any socialism in the world system
No heresies. Experiential Heresies Yes. Heterodox economists who are isolated are rarely department heads
Generally, the gods and goddesses are not jealous of each other Jealousy Capitalists jealous of competing economic systems
No Persecution

 

 Yes. Of its own working class and the oppressed workers’ and peasants’ western imperialism
No Fanaticism Ideology of private enterprise
Ideology of capitalism
No wars over beliefs Wars Wars against non-western countries and against socialism
Cyclic Time orientation Linear, especially after the industrial revolution. Time clocks, 14-hour days
Sacred Earth and nature Exploitation of nature. Pollution treated as “externality”
Ongoing creativity in time and space How frequently is creativity used Ongoing but unconscious collective creativity of workers
Many directions – horizontal Directions Vertical – class struggle between capitalists and working class
No original sin other than human selfishness Original sin None
Opposites are polar and change into each other The nature of opposites Dualistic: Mechanistic materialism vs idealist subjectivism
No. All gods and goddesses have their pros and cons Distribution of virtues and vices Capitalism has virtues – hardworking, thrifty, shrewd
Socialist have vices
Lazy, want something for nothing
Reciprocity, respect, reverence How is the sacred engaged?

 

 No reciprocity – infinite exploitation
Looked down upon

Wealth is land based – foragers, horticulturalists, agriculturalists

 Place or misplace of commerce Unhinged commerce everywhere
Not a virtue Suffering  No value in suffering

Strive for hedonism
No. Earth spirits, rivers, gods and goddesses are moving Idolatry Yes. Commodity fetishism
Stock market – money talks
No proselyting, no missionaries Outreach Capitalist imperialism covers the globe
Decentralized – paleo-Pagan Centralized – MesoPagan
Decentralized—Neo-Pagan		 Coordinated effort Both decentralized competition

Monopolistic corporate centralization
Local, regional at most Spatial reach

 

 Global, everywhere
Ancestors are very important among horticulturalists (reverence) Place of the ancestors Elderly not respected
No ongoing homage
Youth culture
Social situations when the family was embarrassed Shame vs guilt Guilt for working class for not becoming wealthy
Gods are not all powerful nor all knowing Degree of power

 

 Capitalists do have absolute power of monotheism, but they have oligarchic power
Meaningless and irrelevant Faith Faith in “business cycles” and market corrections that the system will never crash
Mediums are ongoing and way of life – women are primary – About past, present and future Intermediaries Prophets intervene with market corrections and Federal Reserve interest fluctuations
No origin.

World is eternal

Cyclic, steady state

 Origin of universe Steady state capitalism imagined to go on forever

Capitalism at the beginning
Adam Smith “truck and barter”
Myths change over time Stability of myths Myths do not change – American dream possible for everyone
Trickers, playful and prevalent Place of trickers

 

 Yes. Market is unpredictable and not subject to law
Inner – immanence Source is inner or outer Transcendence –
Fictitious finance capital, otherworldly with no investment in real goods or infrastructure

Commonalities Between Christianity and Capitalism

  • Both are patriarchal but capitalist systems had to deal with waves of feminism in the last 200 years.
  • Each are intolerant– Christians of Pagans; capitalists of socialism
  • Each have heresies – Christianity has religious heretics, witches; under capitalism, heterodox economists who are opposed to mainstream economics
  • Both Christianity and capitalism have wars — religious wars between Christians and Muslims and capitalist wars against other capitalism nations; imperialist wars against their colonies; economic wars against socialism
  • Both Christians and capitalists see nature as subordinate – Christianity says humans have dominion over nature whereas capitalists exploit nature
  • Both Christians and capitalists hollow out intermediaries. Christians want to eliminate earth spirits, totems, ancestor spirit, goddesses and gods. Capitalists marginalize intermediate decentralized political bodies such as provinces, principalities, kingdoms and city states in favor of nation-states
  • Spatial reach is global – proselytizing missionaries are all over the globe

Capitalist imperialism is spreading everywhere. Just as God is everywhere, capitalism is everywhere

  • Both have a linear sense of time. Under capitalism with the invention of clocks, wrist watches, and time cards during the industrial revolution
  • Both have a dualistic sense of mutually exclusive opposites
  • Christianity or capitalism depreciates and marginalize the ancestors. Under capitalism there is youth culture to replace respect for the elders
  • Both require faith. Christianity in an arbitrary and unpredictable god; capitalism in “business cycles’ and “market corrections” which explain away capitalist crises
  • Divine intervention – unpredictable appearances of prophets in the case of Judeo-Christianity; Federal Reserve for capitalist interventions
  • Value of transcendence – for monotheism a god who is above, before and beyond the world. For capitalism, finance capital – money made on money without any involvement in the production of goods and services

Conclusion

The purpose of this article is to persuade Neo-Pagans to take a more militant stance against both Christianity and capitalism. I began with a brief discussion of how Christianity persecuted Pagans both at the end of the Roman empire as well as in early modern Europe with both the Catholic Inquisition and the witch hunts in Europe and in Salem Massachusetts in the US. I identified eleven ways in which Christianity and Paganism are diametrically opposed to each other in irreconcilable ways. I then presented three objections more compromising Neo-Pagans might make in arguing I am being too hard on Christianity. I rebutted them but gave them the benefit of the doubt in claiming that any ex-Christians who want to join Neo-Pagan circles should have to undergo a kind of 12-step program before they are allowed in.

In the second half of my article, I turned my attention to the relationship between Neo-Paganism and capitalism. I began by addressing the concerns Neo-Pagans may have in my opposing capitalism.  I point out that being against capitalism does not mean I am opposed to Neo-Pagan bookstores, occult supply stores or artisans selling their work. These are market transactions. Markets have existed throughout much of history long before capitalism. Capitalism is a much more all-encompassing and controlling economic system that is way beyond exchange between merchants. I then named six ways in which capitalism is fundamentally opposed to Neo-Pagan ways of life.

In the last part of my article, I briefly identify thirteen ways which Christianity and capitalism share in common. What is unstated is what is the relationship between Neo-Paganism and socialism? For that I direct the reader to my book The Magickal Enchantment of Materialism: Why Marxists Need Neo-Paganism.

You can also find some of my articles in the “Perspective” section of our website Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism.

The post Militant Neo-Pagans Neither Forgive nor Forget first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2025/04/06/militant-neo-pagans-neither-forgive-nor-forget/feed/ 0 524067 Forget about your carbon footprint. Try ‘climatemaxxing.’ https://grist.org/culture/forget-your-carbon-footprint-climatemaxxing/ https://grist.org/culture/forget-your-carbon-footprint-climatemaxxing/#respond Thu, 06 Mar 2025 09:45:00 +0000 https://grist.org/?p=659789 There’s now an easy way to turn any aspect of life into something to optimize — just add “-maxxing.” Gymmaxxing is about getting ripped. Moneymaxxing means accumulating wealth as fast as possible. Over the past couple of years, this social media-driven wellness fad has spread to more and more activities: Tanning is sunmaxxing; drinking plenty of water is watermaxxing. Even at night, the grind for self-improvement continues, with sleepmaxxing hacks designed to help you achieve peak rest.

You could view this trend as a response to a world that feels unpredictable and overwhelming — a way for people to assert control over what they can. And there are few things more unpredictable and overwhelming than climate change, especially as President Donald Trump has begun unraveling policies intended to help the United States shift toward a cleaner economy. With that vacuum in leadership, what if there was a new movement for people to leverage their ability to do something, in any way they can? Why not call it “climatemaxxing?”

Think of it this way: Climatemaxxing would be an optimization challenge, finding the biggest ways to tackle climate change at home, at work, and in your community. Sure, you could #climatemaxx your commute by biking, but achieving maxximum impact might mean joining a committee to make your town more bike-friendly for everyone. And if all you have energy to do is eat a can of beans, a climate-friendly source of protein, for dinner, hey, what once might have been considered a boring meal is now an effort to self-improve by climatemaxxing your diet. Forget about your carbon footprint — climatemaxxing frames action as an aspiration, not a sacrifice, as well as an antidote to despair. 

It’s hard to take any word with a double X seriously, but the idea could inject positivity into a conversation that’s often anchored in guilt and moralizing. One reason why people resist accepting the reality of climate change is that it means admitting they are part of the problem, thanks to the greenhouse gas emissions associated with driving, flying, and eating meat.

“It’s hard for anyone to accept themselves as being the villain of the story, especially in a story so large and wide-sweeping as climate change,” said Emma Frances Bloomfield, a communication professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Climatemaxxing could flip that by helping people see themselves as heroes instead, she said. 

The term might be a bit ironic, since sustainability is typically about reducing your carbon emissions. But climatemaxxing could be seen as maximizing climate-friendly choices, almost like a game. “If you think about certain behaviors as associated with points, then you could think of climatemaxxing as accumulating as many sustainability points as you could,” Bloomfield said. It could also make a meme out of something that would otherwise be weird to share: Picture someone posting a photo of their home’s new energy-efficient heat pump with the hashtag #climatemaxxing.

By embracing the small things but aiming higher, climatemaxxing could also sidestep the debate over what kind of action matters most. Obsessing over your personal carbon footprint has been criticized as a distraction from the big-picture challenge of how to slow global warming. The oil company BP famously promoted the idea of a “carbon footprint,” and Exxon Mobil and Shell have adopted language that holds individuals responsible for climate change.

This critique, however valid, ends up pitting personal responsibility against collective action, as if it were an either-or choice with no middle ground. It has also bred pessimism. In 2019, two-thirds of Americans believed their personal choices could impact climate change, but three years later, that number had dropped to just over half, according to polling from the Associated Press and NORC. 

“I think sometimes there’s this really counterproductive narrative of, you know, throwing up my hands and saying, ‘Well, nothing I do can matter,’” Kimberly Nicholas, a sustainability professor at Lund University in Sweden, said when that poll came out in 2022.

Climatemaxxing offers a more flexible approach to taking action. It doesn’t have to make a distinction between mitigation (cutting greenhouse gas emissions) and adaptation (preparing for and responding to disasters). If you live in an area that’s prone to wildfires, for example, you could climatemaxx your home by removing burnable vegetation close to your house, lessening the risk of it catching fire and spreading the flames around your neighborhood. That’s the sort of thing that could have helped temper the recent catastrophic fires in Los Angeles.

The ethos of -maxxing may feel counter to a movement to make the world a better place. For years, it’s been associated with anxieties about physical imperfections and the pursuit of wellness through buying fitness trackers, wrinkle removers, and crystal-infused water bottles.

The suffix originally comes from gaming, where “min-maxing” refers to maximizing a certain character trait, like strength, at the expense of another. The double X came into play in 2015, when the term “looksmaxxing” — trying to hack your way into being more attractive by any means necessary, including surgery — spread on online forums frequented by incels, or involuntary celibates. Soon enough, a meme was born, and people began applying it to more and more activities, skincaremaxxing with moisturizers and smellmaxxing by dousing themselves in cologne.

Some commentators have suggested that climate change is precisely the sort of thing that makes people seek out these types of control in their lives. In the 2019 book The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells wrote that the emergence of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, the luxury exercise class SoulCycle, and other wellness trends spoke to a growing perception “that the contemporary world is toxic, and that to endure or thrive within it requires extraordinary measures of self-regulation and self-purification.” He called this tendency a cop-out, but warned, “This purity arena is likely to expand, perhaps dramatically, as the climate continues to careen toward visible degradation — and consumers respond by trying to extract themselves from the sludge of the world however they can.”

So there would be a certain irony in adopting -maxxing for climate action. But memes can push back against dangerous ideas by adopting the same format as what they’re targeting. For example, when the pandemic lockdowns in 2020 led to a temporary dip in air pollution and an apparent increase in birdsong, people began posting: “Nature is healing, we are the virus.” A critic of the phrase — which implies that human suffering is good for the planet — created a viral meme by posting “nature is healing” on social media alongside photos of ride-share scooters submerged in a lake. 

It’s a lesson that people who care about climate change could learn from. “The problem in the climate movement isn’t just the abundance of carbon, it is the lack of joy,” Pattie Gonia, an environmentalist and drag queen, said in a recent TED talk. “The scientific facts, the doom and gloom — they scare people, they wake them up, but joy is what will get people out of bed every day to take more action. And if there’s one thing I learned from the art form of drag, it’s that you can take fighting for something seriously without taking yourself too seriously.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Forget about your carbon footprint. Try ‘climatemaxxing.’ on Mar 6, 2025.


This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Kate Yoder.

]]> https://grist.org/culture/forget-your-carbon-footprint-climatemaxxing/feed/ 0 516834 Korean War Anniversary: What We’ve Chosen to Forget about the “Forgotten War” https://www.radiofree.org/2024/07/20/korean-war-anniversary-what-weve-chosen-to-forget-about-the-forgotten-war-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/07/20/korean-war-anniversary-what-weve-chosen-to-forget-about-the-forgotten-war-2/#respond Sat, 20 Jul 2024 17:21:19 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=152089 American soldiers on foreign soil fighting to prop up an army of unmotivated conscripts. Savage bombings. Widespread use of napalm. Massacres of civilians by both the US Army and the allied army we’re propping up. Three million killed, and a larger proportion of civilian deaths than World War II. Lies upon lies about the background […]

The post Korean War Anniversary: What We’ve Chosen to Forget about the “Forgotten War” first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> American soldiers on foreign soil fighting to prop up an army of unmotivated conscripts. Savage bombings. Widespread use of napalm. Massacres of civilians by both the US Army and the allied army we’re propping up. Three million killed, and a larger proportion of civilian deaths than World War II. Lies upon lies about the background of the war and the enemy. What Bruce Cumings, former chair of the history department at the University of Chicago, describes as “Gooks, napalm, rapes, whores, an unreliable ally, a cunning enemy, fundamentally untrained G.I.’s fighting a war their top generals barely understood, fragging of officers, contempt for the know-nothing civilians back home, devilish battles indescribable even to loved ones, press handouts from… headquarters apparently scripted by comedians or lunatics, an ostensible vision of bringing freedom and liberty to a sordid dictatorship run by servants of… imperialism.”

At one point early in this war, the US Army feared that guerrilla fighters were disguising themselves as civilian peasants, and opened fire on them. “Fire on everything, kill ’em all”, one US Army veteran says they were told. “Over the course of a three-day barrage of gunfire and air strafing, hundreds of… civilians were killed,” one account reads. “Survivors recall a stream under the bridge running red with blood and 7th Cavalry veterans recall the near constant screams of women and children.” The US Army stonewalled, and journalists were pressured not to report the full story if at all.

The two paragraphs above are apt descriptions of the Vietnam War and the 1968 My Lai Massacre respectively. Except they are neither descriptions of the Vietnam War nor of My Lai, but instead of the Korean War and the No Gun Ri Massacre carried out by American troops in South Korea in late July 1950.

As a history educator, I’m always surprised at how my students–juniors and seniors in the Los Angeles Unified School District–know almost nothing about the Korean War. A few boys recognize it from their Call of Duty video games, a few others might have heard of the North Korean dictatorship’s bombastic threats, but of the Korean War itself, which ended 71 years ago this week, they know next to nothing.

Part of the problem is the textbooks we are given to use. Neither our US History book, the AP US History book, nor the World History book provide any substantive background to the war. We’re only told, as the regular US History textbook tells us, that “North Korean forces swept across the 38th parallel in a surprise attack on South Korea.” This is distortion by omission.

During WWII, the US and the Soviet Union agreed that, upon Japan’s surrender, Korea, which had been a Japanese colony since 1910, would be divided at the 38th parallel into a Northern, pro-Soviet sector and a Southern, pro-American sector.

The US installed Korean exile Syngman Rhee, who had lived in the US from 1912 to 1945, as the leader of South Korea. Rhee’s government and police force, and almost all leaders of South Korea’s Army, had served the colonial Japanese regime.

The Soviets installed the Korean communists into power, led by Kim Il Sung, who fought a guerrilla war against fascist Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea. The communists had credibility and support because of their long struggle to win Korea’s independence from Japan.

The US History textbook tells us that two Koreas then developed—“one communist and one democratic.” Actually, the “democratic” Rhee regime was brutal, authoritarian, corrupt, unpopular, and widely seen as an artificial creation of the US.

Rhee perpetrated horrific massacres of pro-Communist South Koreans, including the Jeju Massacre (1948-1949), in which up to 30,000 Koreans were killed, and the murder of 100,000 to 200,000 suspected Korean communists in the Bodo League massacre. For years, South Korea falsely claimed this crime was committed by North Korea.

Cumings, author of The Korean War: a History, refers to the US-backed regime’s “atrocious massacres…our ostensibly democratic ally was the worst offender, contrary to the American image of the North Koreans as fiendish terrorists.”

The megalomaniacal Rhee on numerous occasions proclaimed his determination to conquer the communist North. Ignoring American warnings not to provoke a war, Rhee foolishly launched military raids across the border, leading to the deaths of 8,000 South Korean soldiers and thousands of North Korean fighters. At the same time, North Korean-backed communist guerrillas launched guerrilla attacks in South Korea.

With both sides threatening to unify the country by force, the North invaded on June 25, 1950.

Even though the US-Soviet division of Korea gave the South twice the population of the North, the North quickly overran the South. As historian James Stokesbury explains, the masses of conscript South Korean soldiers had little loyalty to the Rhee regime, and soon retreated or defected en masse to the North.

Two days after the invasion, Rhee’s regime abandoned the capital, Seoul, detonating the Hangang Bridge over the Han River in an effort to slow down the North Korean advance. Thousands of refugees were crossing the bridge at the time, leading to hundreds of deaths.

After General Douglas MacArthur’s brilliant landing at Inchon, United Nations forces–90% of whom were American–pushed north towards the Chinese border, spurring China to enter the war. After major Chinese advances, the war ended in a stalemate.

Ignored in our textbooks are the horrific results of the US air war. Air Force General Curtis LeMay, head of the US Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, explained, “[W]e killed off…20 percent of the population…We…burned down every town in North Korea.”

Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk recalled “we were bombing every brick that was standing on top of another, everything that moved.”

In August 1951, war correspondent Tibor Meráy saw “complete devastation between the Yalu River and the capital…[there were] no more cities in North Korea.”

According to the Asia-Pacific Journal:

By the fall of 1952, there were no effective targets left for US planes to hit. Every significant town, city and industrial area in North Korea had already been bombed. In the spring of 1953, the Air Force targeted irrigation dams on the Yalu River, both to destroy the North Korean rice crop and to pressure the Chinese, who would have to supply more food aid to the North. Five reservoirs were hit, flooding thousands of acres of farmland, inundating whole towns and laying waste to the essential food source for millions of North Koreans.

U.S. planes dropped more bombs on the Korean peninsula— 635,000 tons — and more napalm — 32,557 tons — than against Japan during World War II. Yet, incredibly, the word “bomb” does not appear once in the US History textbook’s section on the Korean War.

Cumings says the US “carpet-bombed the north for three years with next to no concern for civilian casualties.”

Nor is there any mention of napalm in our texts. Then-British Prime Minister Winston Churchill condemned the US’ widespread use of napalm as being “very cruel,” saying the US was “tortur[ing] great masses of people” by “splashing it all over the civilian population.” He explained, “Napalm ought not to be used in the way it is being done by the American Forces.”

Nor do our texts mention No Gun Ri or other massacres perpetrated by the American forces. Former Associated Press international correspondent Charles Hanley, author of The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War, explains:

[T]he story of No Gun Ri was shocking when it emerged in 1999, but within the following decade it became clear that events like this were quite commonplace during the Korean War, and it is in some ways what war is all about.

The Associated Press explains that revelations about No Gun Ri “led to an outpouring of other accounts of alleged mass killings of southern civilians by the U.S. military in 1950-51, particularly air attacks. A South Korean investigative commission counted more than 200 cases on its docket by 2008, but the commission was disbanded by a new conservative government in 2010 before it could confirm more than a handful.”

The US History textbook spends 458 words on the conflict between President Truman and General MacArthur and tells us the war cost the US $67 billion and 54,000 killed (actually 36,574). Students are then asked to consider “whether fighting the Korean War was worthwhile” in light of “the loss of American lives” and “fear of communism.” Not once is there mention of the three million Koreans killed, mostly civilians, nor of the 600,000 Chinese killed.

The World History textbook we use is little better, though it does acknowledge that the South Korean government was “undemocratic.” The AP US History textbook, to its credit, acknowledges Korean civilian casualties caused by the American air war as well as the undemocratic nature of the South Korean government, but we’re still given no sense of the horrors perpetrated by the South Korean government nor of why North Korea invaded South Korea.

It is important to remember that misleading or faulty textbooks don’t simply miseducate students, they miseducate their teachers as well. History is a vast subject and any teacher, particularly younger or less experienced teachers, will have areas of history they’re unfamiliar with. In such cases, teachers rely upon the textbook and its related materials–if the textbook does not tell the full truth about an historical event, often the teacher will not be able to either.

The Korean War is often dubbed the “Forgotten War”, and there’s some truth to this, but the real issue is what the American educational establishment has chosen to forget about the “Forgotten War”.

The post Korean War Anniversary: What We’ve Chosen to Forget about the “Forgotten War” first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Glenn Sacks.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/07/20/korean-war-anniversary-what-weve-chosen-to-forget-about-the-forgotten-war-2/feed/ 0 484899 Korean War Anniversary: What We’ve Chosen to Forget about the “Forgotten War” https://www.radiofree.org/2024/07/20/korean-war-anniversary-what-weve-chosen-to-forget-about-the-forgotten-war/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/07/20/korean-war-anniversary-what-weve-chosen-to-forget-about-the-forgotten-war/#respond Sat, 20 Jul 2024 17:21:19 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=152089 American soldiers on foreign soil fighting to prop up an army of unmotivated conscripts. Savage bombings. Widespread use of napalm. Massacres of civilians by both the US Army and the allied army we’re propping up. Three million killed, and a larger proportion of civilian deaths than World War II. Lies upon lies about the background […]

The post Korean War Anniversary: What We’ve Chosen to Forget about the “Forgotten War” first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> American soldiers on foreign soil fighting to prop up an army of unmotivated conscripts. Savage bombings. Widespread use of napalm. Massacres of civilians by both the US Army and the allied army we’re propping up. Three million killed, and a larger proportion of civilian deaths than World War II. Lies upon lies about the background of the war and the enemy. What Bruce Cumings, former chair of the history department at the University of Chicago, describes as “Gooks, napalm, rapes, whores, an unreliable ally, a cunning enemy, fundamentally untrained G.I.’s fighting a war their top generals barely understood, fragging of officers, contempt for the know-nothing civilians back home, devilish battles indescribable even to loved ones, press handouts from… headquarters apparently scripted by comedians or lunatics, an ostensible vision of bringing freedom and liberty to a sordid dictatorship run by servants of… imperialism.”

At one point early in this war, the US Army feared that guerrilla fighters were disguising themselves as civilian peasants, and opened fire on them. “Fire on everything, kill ’em all”, one US Army veteran says they were told. “Over the course of a three-day barrage of gunfire and air strafing, hundreds of… civilians were killed,” one account reads. “Survivors recall a stream under the bridge running red with blood and 7th Cavalry veterans recall the near constant screams of women and children.” The US Army stonewalled, and journalists were pressured not to report the full story if at all.

The two paragraphs above are apt descriptions of the Vietnam War and the 1968 My Lai Massacre respectively. Except they are neither descriptions of the Vietnam War nor of My Lai, but instead of the Korean War and the No Gun Ri Massacre carried out by American troops in South Korea in late July 1950.

As a history educator, I’m always surprised at how my students–juniors and seniors in the Los Angeles Unified School District–know almost nothing about the Korean War. A few boys recognize it from their Call of Duty video games, a few others might have heard of the North Korean dictatorship’s bombastic threats, but of the Korean War itself, which ended 71 years ago this week, they know next to nothing.

Part of the problem is the textbooks we are given to use. Neither our US History book, the AP US History book, nor the World History book provide any substantive background to the war. We’re only told, as the regular US History textbook tells us, that “North Korean forces swept across the 38th parallel in a surprise attack on South Korea.” This is distortion by omission.

During WWII, the US and the Soviet Union agreed that, upon Japan’s surrender, Korea, which had been a Japanese colony since 1910, would be divided at the 38th parallel into a Northern, pro-Soviet sector and a Southern, pro-American sector.

The US installed Korean exile Syngman Rhee, who had lived in the US from 1912 to 1945, as the leader of South Korea. Rhee’s government and police force, and almost all leaders of South Korea’s Army, had served the colonial Japanese regime.

The Soviets installed the Korean communists into power, led by Kim Il Sung, who fought a guerrilla war against fascist Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea. The communists had credibility and support because of their long struggle to win Korea’s independence from Japan.

The US History textbook tells us that two Koreas then developed—“one communist and one democratic.” Actually, the “democratic” Rhee regime was brutal, authoritarian, corrupt, unpopular, and widely seen as an artificial creation of the US.

Rhee perpetrated horrific massacres of pro-Communist South Koreans, including the Jeju Massacre (1948-1949), in which up to 30,000 Koreans were killed, and the murder of 100,000 to 200,000 suspected Korean communists in the Bodo League massacre. For years, South Korea falsely claimed this crime was committed by North Korea.

Cumings, author of The Korean War: a History, refers to the US-backed regime’s “atrocious massacres…our ostensibly democratic ally was the worst offender, contrary to the American image of the North Koreans as fiendish terrorists.”

The megalomaniacal Rhee on numerous occasions proclaimed his determination to conquer the communist North. Ignoring American warnings not to provoke a war, Rhee foolishly launched military raids across the border, leading to the deaths of 8,000 South Korean soldiers and thousands of North Korean fighters. At the same time, North Korean-backed communist guerrillas launched guerrilla attacks in South Korea.

With both sides threatening to unify the country by force, the North invaded on June 25, 1950.

Even though the US-Soviet division of Korea gave the South twice the population of the North, the North quickly overran the South. As historian James Stokesbury explains, the masses of conscript South Korean soldiers had little loyalty to the Rhee regime, and soon retreated or defected en masse to the North.

Two days after the invasion, Rhee’s regime abandoned the capital, Seoul, detonating the Hangang Bridge over the Han River in an effort to slow down the North Korean advance. Thousands of refugees were crossing the bridge at the time, leading to hundreds of deaths.

After General Douglas MacArthur’s brilliant landing at Inchon, United Nations forces–90% of whom were American–pushed north towards the Chinese border, spurring China to enter the war. After major Chinese advances, the war ended in a stalemate.

Ignored in our textbooks are the horrific results of the US air war. Air Force General Curtis LeMay, head of the US Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, explained, “[W]e killed off…20 percent of the population…We…burned down every town in North Korea.”

Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk recalled “we were bombing every brick that was standing on top of another, everything that moved.”

In August 1951, war correspondent Tibor Meráy saw “complete devastation between the Yalu River and the capital…[there were] no more cities in North Korea.”

According to the Asia-Pacific Journal:

By the fall of 1952, there were no effective targets left for US planes to hit. Every significant town, city and industrial area in North Korea had already been bombed. In the spring of 1953, the Air Force targeted irrigation dams on the Yalu River, both to destroy the North Korean rice crop and to pressure the Chinese, who would have to supply more food aid to the North. Five reservoirs were hit, flooding thousands of acres of farmland, inundating whole towns and laying waste to the essential food source for millions of North Koreans.

U.S. planes dropped more bombs on the Korean peninsula— 635,000 tons — and more napalm — 32,557 tons — than against Japan during World War II. Yet, incredibly, the word “bomb” does not appear once in the US History textbook’s section on the Korean War.

Cumings says the US “carpet-bombed the north for three years with next to no concern for civilian casualties.”

Nor is there any mention of napalm in our texts. Then-British Prime Minister Winston Churchill condemned the US’ widespread use of napalm as being “very cruel,” saying the US was “tortur[ing] great masses of people” by “splashing it all over the civilian population.” He explained, “Napalm ought not to be used in the way it is being done by the American Forces.”

Nor do our texts mention No Gun Ri or other massacres perpetrated by the American forces. Former Associated Press international correspondent Charles Hanley, author of The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War, explains:

[T]he story of No Gun Ri was shocking when it emerged in 1999, but within the following decade it became clear that events like this were quite commonplace during the Korean War, and it is in some ways what war is all about.

The Associated Press explains that revelations about No Gun Ri “led to an outpouring of other accounts of alleged mass killings of southern civilians by the U.S. military in 1950-51, particularly air attacks. A South Korean investigative commission counted more than 200 cases on its docket by 2008, but the commission was disbanded by a new conservative government in 2010 before it could confirm more than a handful.”

The US History textbook spends 458 words on the conflict between President Truman and General MacArthur and tells us the war cost the US $67 billion and 54,000 killed (actually 36,574). Students are then asked to consider “whether fighting the Korean War was worthwhile” in light of “the loss of American lives” and “fear of communism.” Not once is there mention of the three million Koreans killed, mostly civilians, nor of the 600,000 Chinese killed.

The World History textbook we use is little better, though it does acknowledge that the South Korean government was “undemocratic.” The AP US History textbook, to its credit, acknowledges Korean civilian casualties caused by the American air war as well as the undemocratic nature of the South Korean government, but we’re still given no sense of the horrors perpetrated by the South Korean government nor of why North Korea invaded South Korea.

It is important to remember that misleading or faulty textbooks don’t simply miseducate students, they miseducate their teachers as well. History is a vast subject and any teacher, particularly younger or less experienced teachers, will have areas of history they’re unfamiliar with. In such cases, teachers rely upon the textbook and its related materials–if the textbook does not tell the full truth about an historical event, often the teacher will not be able to either.

The Korean War is often dubbed the “Forgotten War”, and there’s some truth to this, but the real issue is what the American educational establishment has chosen to forget about the “Forgotten War”.

The post Korean War Anniversary: What We’ve Chosen to Forget about the “Forgotten War” first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Glenn Sacks.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/07/20/korean-war-anniversary-what-weve-chosen-to-forget-about-the-forgotten-war/feed/ 0 484898 ‘We’ll never forget,’ Tiananmen massacre families write to Xi Jinping https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/tiananmen-square-massacre-anniversary-05312024165050.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/tiananmen-square-massacre-anniversary-05312024165050.html#respond Fri, 31 May 2024 20:51:53 +0000 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/tiananmen-square-massacre-anniversary-05312024165050.html The relatives of civilians killed by Chinese troops who crushed pro-democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square with machine guns and tanks on the night of June 3-4, 1989, have written to President Xi Jinping calling for an official reckoning with the bloodshed on the 35th anniversary of the crackdown.

"We will never forget the lives that were lost to those brutal bullets or crushed by tanks on June 4 35 years ago," the letter said.

"Those who disappeared, whose relatives couldn't even find their bodies to wipe away the blood and bid them a final farewell," the letter said. "It is too cruel that this happened along a 10-kilometer stretch of Chang'an Boulevard in Beijing in peacetime."

Public mourning for victims or discussion of the events of spring and summer 1989 are banned in China, and references to June 4, 1989, are blocked, filtered or deleted by the Great Firewall of government internet censorship.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, died when late supreme leader Deng Xiaoping ordered troops into the Chinese capital to clear protesters and hunger-striking students from Tiananmen Square. 

While any account of the events of that summer have been scrubbed from the public record, younger people have been able to find out about it by visiting overseas websites, and have started taking part in annual commemorative activities around the world alongside exiled Hong Kongers.

Campaigning for accountability

The letter is the latest to be addressed to China's highest-ranking leader in what has become an annual ritual for the Tiananmen Mothers, a group of bereaved relatives that campaigns for official accountability, transparency about the death toll and compensation for victims' families.

It said official rhetoric on the crackdown was "intolerable" to the families of victims because it "reverses right and wrong, and ignores the facts."

The letters have never gotten a reply, and bereaved relatives are typically asked to keep a low profile when the sensitive anniversary of the bloodshed rolls around.

Calls to group spokesperson You Weijie and member Zhang Xianling rang unanswered on Friday after the letter was published.

Former 1989 student protester Zheng Xuguang, who now lives in the United States, said he isn't surprised by the deafening silence from Beijing, which has described the weeks-long student-led pro-democracy movement on Tiananmen Square as "counterrevolutionary rebellion," or “political turmoil.”

ENG_CHN_JUNE4 WRAP_05312024.2.jpg
A military helicopter drops leaflets above Tiananmen Square, Beijing, on May 22, 1989, which state that the student protesters should leave the square as soon as possible on Monday morning. (Shunsuke Akatsuka/Reuters)

"How can they admit that they were wrong to kill people?" Zheng said. "Xi Jinping and the Communist Party are co-dependent; if Xi were to reappraise the official verdict of June 4 ... the Communist Party would fall from power."

"I don't think he's going to do that, because there's no room in his ideology for these ideas."

Tseng Chien-yuen, an associate professor at Taiwan's Central University, said today's China is in sore need of some reflection on the massacre, however.

"They need to look at it again and reappraise it, apologize and compensate the innocent students and others who were shot and killed back then, and think about whether to hold those responsible accountable," Tseng said. 

"I don't think Xi Jinping would need to bear the historical responsibility for the legacy of [late supreme leader] Deng Xiaoping," he said.

Poll: What would you do?

RFA's Mandarin Service asked its followers and listeners in a poll on X whether they would join the 1989 student movement today, if they could travel back in time to 1989.

Many listeners responded outright that they would, while others said their view of the tragedy was colored by the official view, and didn't change until they left China. Others said they have become more radical than the 1989 protesters.

"We were very naive back then, because we didn't want to overthrow the Communist Party, but to reform it," a person who gave only the nickname Matt responded. "Unfortunately, the Communist Party didn't even give people the chance to do that."

"For our generation, June 4 is an unfamiliar expression," wrote a high schooler from the northeastern city of Qingdao. "Growing up under the red flag of this fake party, we have been indoctrinated with the idea that loving the party and loving the country are the same thing."

Another responded by email that they hadn't believed overseas media reports about the massacre at first, despite finding them on overseas websites.

"Mainland Chinese were either misled by their pro-party stance, or they knew a little more than that, but still thought that the protests had to be brought to an end somehow," they said. 

A respondent who gave the nickname Key said he had learned about the massacre and the student movement from older people in his family, and said he admired the 1989 protesters, but added: "Times have changed, and the younger generation needs to fight for their rights in a peaceful and rational way."

User "wophb" wrote: "35 years on, the June 4 incident still has a profound impact on us and is worth reflecting on. Each generation has a unique mission."

Drawing a parallel with the "white paper" protests across China in 2022, the user said they would consider taking part in the 1989 movement if they could go back in time.

Successful brainwashing

Wu Heming, a Chinese student currently in California, said he is still noticing the after-effects of his education at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party two years after arriving on American soil.

"This is mainly because the Chinese Communist Party's brainwashing in education is very, very successful," Wu said. "From childhood onwards, people have no other channels through which to access any other information, so all of your thought patterns get solidified by that rhetoric."

Another student and former "white paper" protester Zhang Jinrui said the two movements had a lot in common. “

"If you compare those who participated in the June 4 incident and those who participated in the white paper movement, they were both trying to promote democracy in China, but in different contexts," Zhang said.

White paper” protesters got their name from holding up blank sheets of paper during spontaneous protests at the end of November 2022 amid pent-up frustration with years of COVID-19 restrictions that came to a head after an apartment building fire in Urumqi, in the far-western part of the country, killed inhabitants who reportedly were trapped inside.

ENG_CHN_JUNE4 WRAP_05312024.3.jpg
Author and university professor Rowena He, who took part in the 1989 movement, in dialogue with former Human Rights Watch China director Sophie Richardson at a symposium marking the 25th anniversary at Georgetown University on April 18, 2014. (Kitty Wang/RFA)

Zhang also believes that times have changed, however.

"Many people of my generation have absorbed liberal ideas that have developed in the world over the past few decades, including national self-determination, respect for the identities of sexual minorities and of ethnic minorities," Zhang said.

"In the 1980s, a lot of people were asking 'what kind of China do we want?' instead of wondering whether the concept of China is even necessary," he said. "Now my generation is starting to deconstruct this concept."

More darkly, Zhang added: "I think they were motivated by hope, while our generation is motivated by despair -- we did what we did out of despair under [COVID-19] lockdown. All we could do was to take a gamble."

Author and university professor Rowena He, who took part in the 1989 movement, said she still marks the anniversary every year, and holds onto the hope she felt back then.

"We all felt that we had nothing," she told a symposium marking the 25th anniversary at Georgetown University on April 18. "They had guns, tanks, and machine guns."

"But in the end, I think many of my generation...still kept the faith alive, while Hong Kong lit candles for us for 30 years, for truth and justice." 

"I think history is on our side," He said. "One day we will see truth and justice."

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.


This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Qian Lang and Kitty Wang for RFA Mandarin.

]]> https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/tiananmen-square-massacre-anniversary-05312024165050.html/feed/ 0 477519 Taiwan’s people must never forget Tiananmen massacre, artists warn https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/art-exhibit-taiwan-05242024150838.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/art-exhibit-taiwan-05242024150838.html#respond Sat, 25 May 2024 13:43:32 +0000 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/art-exhibit-taiwan-05242024150838.html The unknown "Tank Man" hero who faced down a line of People's Liberation Army tanks in his shirtsleeves and holding a shopping bag in June 1989. A grieving woman pulling a tank out of a baby's body. The hastily packed suitcases of Hong Kongers packed with memories of home as they fled an ongoing crackdown in their city.

These and many more works of art are on display in Taipei through June 13 in a bid to warn the democratic island's residents of the dangers of forgetting -- specifically the threat to human rights and freedoms posed by authoritarian rule.

As the island is encircled by People’s Liberation Army forces on military exercises, artists are marking the 35th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre with an exhibit that includes key moments in the pro-democracy movement in recent years as well as commemoration of those who died in the 1989 bloodshed.

The exhibit, titled "Preserving Memory: Life, Death,” brings together more than 30 works by 18 artists in wooden frames resembling household cabinets, including 3D-printed replicas of the “Pillar of Shame” massacre memorial sculpture, which has been seized by national security police in Hong Kong. 

ENG_CHN_TIANANMEN EXHIBIT_05242024.2.jpg
A grieving woman pulls a tank out of a baby's body in a painting on show at the "Preserving Memory: Life, Death" exhibit in Taipei on May 23, 2024. (RFA/Hsia Hsiao-hwa)

Upstairs at the imposing blue-and-white memorial hall commemorating Taiwan's former authoritarian ruler Chiang Kai-shek, with a candlelight vigil to be held in Democracy Boulevard outside the hall on June 4 this year, more than one third of the works on show are from Hong Kong artists who fled their city amid a crackdown on dissent in the wake of the 2019 pro-democracy protests.

Candlelight vigils were held for the victims of the June 4, 1989, massacre every year in Hong Kong for three decades, before they were banned in 2020 and their organizers jailed.

Dangers

Tiananmen massacre eyewitness Wu Renhua told the launch event on Thursday that he hopes the exhibit will remind Taiwan's 23 million people, particularly the younger generation, of the dangers of Chinese Communist Party rule.

Speaking as People's Liberation Army warships and planes encircled the island on military exercises intended as a "serious punishment" for Taiwan's democratically elected President Lai Ching-te, Wu said Taiwan is currently under threat today because of the Chinese Communist Party's authoritarian system.

ENG_CHN_TIANANMEN EXHIBIT_05242024.3.jpg
Exiled Hong Kong artist Choi Chi-ho (right) and curator Abbey Li at the opening of the "Preserving Memory: Life, Death" exhibit in Taipei on May 23, 2024. (RFA/Hsia Hsiao-hwa.)

"Over the years, some political parties, some politicians, and some media in Taiwan have been trying to curry favor with the Chinese Communist Party, saying that it's different now, and that China today has changed," Wu told the event. "This worries me greatly."

"I hope that through commemorative activities for June 4 and by telling the truth about the June 4 massacre, more Taiwanese, particularly the younger generation, will see the violent nature of the Chinese Communist Party for what it is," Wu said, calling for "a sense of crisis” to safeguard Taiwan's freedoms and its democratic system.

Exiled Hong Kong artist Choi Chi-ho, who exhibited his suitcase as an artwork, said he had packed in a huge hurry when the time came for him to leave Hong Kong, with only a couple of days to get himself ready.

"I just stuffed everything I could find ... anything I could find to represent my 20 years of life in Hong Kong, my experiences and memories, into that suitcase," Choi told RFA Mandarin, adding that he couldn’t bear to open it until he heard about the exhibit.

ENG_CHN_TIANANMEN EXHIBIT_05242024.4.jpg
Organizers from Taiwan's New School for Democracy pose at the launch of the "Preserving Memory: Life, Death" exhibit in Taipei on May 23, 2024. RFA/Hsia Hsiao-hwa.

Among the items in the suitcase was the key to his old apartment.

“My house key,” Choi explained. “I thought maybe one day I’d go back, but eventually, it just wound up here. I’ll never be able to use it again.”

“My ex-boyfriend wrote me a farewell letter and gave me some of his clothes,” he said.

"When my mother found out I was leaving, she took out a Bible and wrote some words of blessing on it for me," he said. "When I opened it later, I saw she'd also put some family photos from my childhood in there."

Authoritarian control

Choi said the exhibit seeks to underline what can happen to a society once it comes under Beijing's control.

"Taiwan has also lived through a very authoritarian era," he said in a reference to the one-party rule of the Kuomintang that ended with the direct election of the island's president in 1996. 

"Only by understanding human rights violations in our own land, or in the territory next door, do we realize that freedom and democracy are hard-won, and that our predecessors paid a high price in blood, sweat and human life for them," he said.

ENG_CHN_TIANANMEN EXHIBIT_05242024.5.jpg
Former Hong Kong bookseller Lam Wing-kei speaks at the launch of the "Preserving Memory: Life, Death" exhibit in Taipei on May 23, 2024. RFA/Hsia Hsiao-hwa.

Canada-based democracy activist Yang Ruohui said by video message that respect for human rights was the biggest difference between Taiwan and China under Communist Party rule.

"I would like to call on the people of Taiwan to pay attention to the human rights situation in China, and to help us build a Chinese community in diaspora that embraces human rights, freedom and democracy as a way of life, and demonstrates it to those in mainland China," he said.

Former Hong Kong bookseller Lam Wing-kei, who fled to Taiwan after being held for months by Chinese state security police for selling banned political books to customers in mainland China, said it's not enough just to mark the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre every year.

"We must also reflect on why this happened in 1989," he told the launch event. "Was it because young people embraced Western democratic ideas ... during reforms and opening up, then demanded that the Chinese government itself reform and move towards a democratic transition?"

A former frontline protester from the 2019 pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong choked up while addressing the launch party, and called on Hong Kongers and Taiwanese to work together to prevent authoritarianism from endangering democracy yet again.

The "Preserving Memory: Life, Death" exhibit runs on the second floor of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei through June 13.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.


This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Hsia Hsiao-hwa for RFA Mandarin.

]]> https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/art-exhibit-taiwan-05242024150838.html/feed/ 0 476398 Forget Labor Day, May Day is the true workers’ holiday https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/01/forget-labor-day-may-day-is-the-true-workers-holiday/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/01/forget-labor-day-may-day-is-the-true-workers-holiday/#respond Wed, 01 May 2024 16:11:32 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=e7201c674d4fd827005a04325ba44e2e
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/05/01/forget-labor-day-may-day-is-the-true-workers-holiday/feed/ 0 472511 Two Years Later, Massacre Of Ukrainian Civilians In Bucha Is ‘Impossible To Forget’ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/31/two-years-later-massacre-of-ukrainian-civilians-in-bucha-is-impossible-to-forget/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/31/two-years-later-massacre-of-ukrainian-civilians-in-bucha-is-impossible-to-forget/#respond Sun, 31 Mar 2024 08:54:52 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=ecd339be165d1f24cc6e190a1d2fc281
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/03/31/two-years-later-massacre-of-ukrainian-civilians-in-bucha-is-impossible-to-forget/feed/ 0 467240 INTERVIEW: ‘I’ll never forget it as long as I live. It was very dangerous.’ https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/hui-muslim-run-us-asylum-seeker-03082024131630.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/hui-muslim-run-us-asylum-seeker-03082024131630.html#respond Sat, 09 Mar 2024 14:28:33 +0000 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/hui-muslim-run-us-asylum-seeker-03082024131630.html Last year, Li Kai and his family were among 24,000 Chinese nationals who made a grueling trip through Central America to the Mexican-U.S. border as part of the "run" movement of ordinary people seeking political asylum in the United States. 

A member of the Hui Muslim minority from the northern city of Tangshan, Li took his family and fled the country after a standoff with the authorities over changes to his mosque – part of the ruling Communist Party’s “sinicization of religion” policy. 

In a recent interview with RFA Mandarin, Li, 44, described his family's experience of “walking the line,” as the risky journey is known in Chinese.

RFA: Can you describe the route you took through the jungle to get to the United States?

Li Kai: Our journey required us to navigate the renowned tropical rainforests of South America, which included a boat ride. We waited two days in Necoclí [Colombia], by the Caribbean Sea, for our transportation. Local people smugglers, or snakeheads, visited our lodging to discuss and plan our path, after which we paid them and prepared to board the boat.

RFA: How much did this part of the journey cost?

Li Kai: For the boat ride and the trek through the jungle, adults were charged US$1,100 each, my eldest child $600, and the youngest $500, totaling $3,300 for my family.

ENG_CHN_INTERVIEWMuslimsRun_03052024.2.jpg
Migrants gather in Necocli, Colombia, a stopping point for travelers taking boats to Acandi, which leads to the Darien Gap, Oct. 13, 2022. (Fernando Vergara/AP)

RFA: What was your experience crossing the Caribbean Sea?

Li Kai: I’ll never forget it as long as I live. It was very dangerous. The boat was small, made of fiberglass, which made it especially vulnerable to the unpredictable sea conditions and weather of the Caribbean. We had to travel at night without lights. I felt an overwhelming sense of guilt for putting my kids in such danger because I had gotten into trouble in China. 

I heard that one of these boats had capsized and people had drowned. The whole boat juddered from stem to stern, and we were drenched in water. My children, who had no idea of the danger, fell asleep while I held them tight, one in each arm. After two hours, we reached a landing point at the edge of the rainforest.

RFA: Were there other Chinese people on the boat with you?

Li Kai: Yes, about 90% of the passengers were Chinese, along with a few South Americans. The boat could carry 50 to 60 people, and most of them were from China.

After we landed, we rested overnight, and at 6 a.m. the next day, we took the mountainous trail into the rainforest.

RFA: What was it like trekking through the rainforest?

Li Kai: It was extremely challenging. The terrain was treacherous with cliffs and steep slopes, easy to fall from. I led my kids through it -- they did fine, just followed along. We took brief rests, about 15 minutes each, and it took us around 10 hours to walk it. 

ENG_CHN_INTERVIEWMuslimsRun_03052024.3.jpg
Migrants walk across the Darien Gap from Colombia to Panama on their journey to reach the United States, on May 9, 2023. (Ivan Valencia/AP)

I wasn't prepared. I was worried that it would be inconvenient to carry food on such a mountainous trail, so I only brought water. The water ran out before we were halfway through, leaving us all thirsty, including the kids.

The first half of the rainforest trail is in Colombia, and the second half is in Panama. When we got to the end of the 10-hour trek, the guide took everyone to an official Panamanian refugee camp.

RFA: How did you wind up at an official refugee camp in Panama after such a clandestine journey?

Li Kai: Due to the large number of people walking the line into the United States … it was likely a humanitarian gesture, to give us somewhere to stay.

RFA: After entering Guatemala, you were picked up by a people smuggler you had contacted earlier to transport you to Mexico, correct?

Li Kai: Yes, after arriving in Guatemala, the previously contacted snakehead was there to meet us. They planned to transport us to Mexico. Seventeen of us were crammed into an 8-seater Honda. Halfway along, they transferred us to a vehicle used for transporting livestock.

We were standing or squatting inside, a mix of Chinese, Blacks, South Americans, every kind of person you can think of. We crossed a river by road into Mexico.

RFA: In Tapachula [Mexico], you bought tickets to Mexico City, but then you were stopped by Mexican immigration en route.

Li Kai: On the bus were us four, along with a few other Chinese and South Americans. During a passport check, they found out we were heading to the U.S. and wouldn't let us go any further. People with children were pulled aside and taken to an immigration facility, while the singles were taken elsewhere. We stayed there for a day until the afternoon of the next day, when we registered and signed some form of promise or agreement, and then they released all four of us.

RFA: At that point, you didn't know where you were or what your next steps would be?

Li Kai: We had no choice but to go back to Tapachula, where we found a snakehead from Guangdong [China]. It became clear that the Chinese snakeheads might have been middlemen, responsible only for Chinese migrants. In Tapachula, there's a restaurant run by a woman who is also a snakehead. The cost for us, two adults and two children, totaled $12,600.

RFA: What was this money for?

Li Kai: It was to get us from Tapachula to Mexico City.

RFA: What happened when you got there?

Li Kai: The snakehead responsible for getting us to the border wall was also Chinese. He charged $700 per person, regardless of age. The next morning, two vehicles picked us up to take us to the next city, Reynosa, very close to the border. Upon entering a hideout, it was filled with Chinese people who had arrived before us. 

After waiting a few hours, everyone got into vehicles headed for the Rio Grande. It took 4 hours to get to the riverbank, guarded by local armed gangs. We crossed the river in the latter half of the night and then walked through what seemed like dense grass or a small forest, with vegetation over a person's height.

ENG_CHN_INTERVIEWMuslimsRun_03052024.4.png
Li Kai and his wife and children after their arrival in the United States are seen in an undated photo. Faces blurred to protect childrens’ privacy. (Li Kai)

RFA: What about your children?

Li Kai: They went separately; their mother took them because it was too dangerous for women and children to go through the dense vegetation, with the risk of snakes and poisonous spiders. They took a different route.

After emerging, there was another river to cross, leading to flatter ground. Our guide told us we had reached the United States, and then they left us.

RFA: Then you were picked up by U.S. Border Patrol on June 1, 2023?

Li Kai: Men were separated from women and children for checks — bags, clothes, everything except for mobile phones and chargers had to be given up. 

Single individuals and families with children were transported in separate buses to a temporary immigration detention center, where men and women were segregated. The mothers stayed with their children, and the men were in another room. After two days, during which time they gave us some food, we were released.

RFA: But your journey wasn't over, was it?

Li Kai: We were taken to a church reception center. We wanted to go to New York, but I was unaware of the free bus service from Texas to New York until I arrived at a local church, which was filled with people from various countries all waiting for transportation. Later, I found out that Texas was sending illegal immigrants to New York by bus as a protest over illegal immigration.

RFA: What happened when you got to New York?

Li Kai: We were dropped off at the Roosevelt Hotel early in the morning. All in all, it was a pretty moving experience. 

In China, the narrative about the United States is filled with conflict, evil, chaos and racial discrimination. But the reality was the complete opposite. I'm incredibly grateful for the kindness we were shown upon arrival; it was unimaginable after such a difficult and bitter journey.

RFA: What prompted you to leave China? There was a protest by local Muslims on April 24, 2023, about the mosque in your village. Can you tell us more about that?

Li Kai: Yes, the government was about to demolish it. That Monday, many people went to the mosque to seek advice from the imam. The authorities were ready for us, and there was some physical contact — it got quite chaotic. The crowd was dispersed within an hour, and I rushed back home in a hurry. 

ENG_CHN_INTERVIEWMuslimsRun_03052024.5.JPG
Migrants from China emerge from thick brush after being smuggled across the Rio Grande river into the United States from Mexico in Fronton, Texas, April 7, 2023. (Reuters)

RFA: What exactly happened to cause the conflict between the police and Muslims?

Li Kai: The police accused us of causing a disturbance. They claimed the decision to demolish the mosque and move to another location had been made in consultation with the imam. 

The younger members of our community had been barred from entering the mosque, which had caused dissatisfaction, but hadn't led to an outburst until that point. But this time, led by a prominent Muslim from our group, we ended up in a scuffle with the police.

RFA: Were there any injuries during the incident?

Li Kai: I'm not sure.

RFA: Why did you decide to flee immediately afterward?

Li Kai: I was worried that the authorities would target me after the incident, and that there would even be repercussions for my kids, based on a similar thing that happened a few years ago. Children had been barred from entering mosques. Only over-18s were allowed in, so my kids weren’t allowed in either. So I took my wife and kids and left immediately, getting a friend to drive us to Shenzhen.

RFA: Did you have any specific plan when you decided to flee?

Li Kai: No, there was no plan. My main concern was the authorities would come after me because my children were registered as being of Muslim faith at primary school. I had long had a sense of impending crisis about our situation. 

The mosque incident was the last straw. I left on a Monday night, and by the time the police visited my mother's home looking for me, I was already gone.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.

Radio Free Asia has been unable to confirm Li's account of his journey independently. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.


This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Mandarin.

]]> https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/hui-muslim-run-us-asylum-seeker-03082024131630.html/feed/ 0 463076 Never Forget Who Donald Trump Really Is https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/16/never-forget-who-donald-trump-really-is/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/16/never-forget-who-donald-trump-really-is/#respond Fri, 16 Feb 2024 06:59:37 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=313520 Since the mainstream media is unable to let go of the issue of President Joe Biden’s age, perhaps it is time to remember just who the 77-year-old Donald Trump really is.  Trump poses a serious threat; he garnered more than 63 million votes in 2016, and despite a failed first term presidency, added 11 million more votes in 2020.  His control of the Republican Party is greater now than that of any other Republican in history.  Given the international trend toward authoritarian leaders in Europe and elsewhere as well as our own cynical populace, it is essential to review the personality and psyche of Donald Trump. More

The post Never Forget Who Donald Trump Really Is appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

]]>

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“You didn’t pay?  You’re delinquent!  No, I would not protect you.  In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.  You gotta pay.  You gotta pay your bills.”

– Donald Trump, February 10, 2024, responding allegedly to a “leader of a big state” who asked “If we don’t pay” enough to NATO “and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?”

Donald Trump, widely known for stiffing his creditors, drew an enthusiastic response from a campaign audience when he made his troubling statements on behalf of “America First” and American isolationism.  These statements were reminders of his 16-minute inauguration speech in 2017, when Trump berated the Washington elites for ignoring the American people and allowing inner cities to fester in “crime and gangs and drugs.” “The American carnage stops right here, right now,” he said. “From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first. America first.”

Since the mainstream media is unable to let go of the issue of President Joe Biden’s age, perhaps it is time to remember just who the 77-year-old Donald Trump really is.  Trump poses a serious threat; he garnered more than 63 million votes in 2016, and despite a failed first term presidency, added 11 million more votes in 2020.  His control of the Republican Party is greater now than that of any other Republican in history.  Given the international trend toward authoritarian leaders in Europe and elsewhere as well as our own cynical populace, it is essential to review the personality and psyche of Donald Trump.

The fact that nuclear arsenals are in the hands of such unpredictable actors as Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong-un is hardly reassuring.  Adding Donald Trump to that list would create greater concerns.  Presumably if Trump was seeking to become Airman Trump, he would not be certified as fit to handle nuclear weapons.  As someone who held high-level security clearances in 42 years of government service, I’m confident that Trump could not receive a security clearance at any level, particularly the Q level for nuclear weapons.  His own handling of sensitive intelligence materials at Mar-a-Lago and elsewhere is particularly dispositive in this regard.

Just recall that former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s reference to Trump as a “fucking moron” was in response to the then president’s case for expanding the U.S. nuclear arsenal as well as for justifying the use of nuclear weapons, including the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states.  Since the president of the United States has unlimited authority to launch nuclear weapons at a time of his/her choosing, considerable thought should be given to the trustworthiness of the commander-in-chief.  The Congress can decide the appropriate number of military bands; it has no role in the initiation of a nuclear holocaust. As the late Bruce Blair, a former Air Force nuclear missile launch officer, warned, “The presidency has evolved into something akin to a nuclear monarchy.”

We know all we need to know about Trump’s decision-making capabilities from his handling of the pandemic crisis in 2020.  Instead of authorizing the Federal Executive Management Agency (FEMA) to manage the crisis, Trump named his son-in-law to create a coronavirus response team that concentrated on the private sector.  Trump withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization and emphasized political messaging rather than professional information to inform the American public.  He told governors that the states were on their own for testing and producing masks. At a press conference in April 2020, Trump recommended an “injection” of disinfectant into a person to prevent a Covid infection.  Is it any wonder that U.S. rates of infections and deaths were among the worst in the world?

Mental health professionals spoke out in the first year of Trump’s presidency, but there have been no authoritative warnings recently.  In 2017, Bandy Lee’s “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President” was a New York Times best seller, which is highly unusual for an edited academic book.  The book was part of the Duty to Warn movement, which ignored the so-called Goldwater Rule that dissuaded psychiatrists from diagnosing a public figure they hadn’t personally interviewed.  Trump’s aberrant behavior, which has predictably worsened over the years, was too profound to ignore.  Trump’s appointments of two uber-hawks—John Bolton and Mike Pompeo—added to the anxiety of the time.  Trump tried and failed to appoint new leaders at the Department of Justice and the Central Intelligence Agency to enhance his authoritarian control of the bureaucracy.

Trump’s obvious instability has worsened over the past year as the legal and political challenges that he faces become more severe.  His behavior points to megalomania as well as a malevolent narcissistic personality.  Trump’s tantrums were on display in his first 24 hours as president, when he never tired of inflating the size of his inaugural crowd.  I criticized Trump’s appointment of so many retired and active duty general officers to key national security positions, but the troika of generals (Mattis, McMaster, and Kelly) actually became the “adults in the room.” Even more telling, they were among the first to leave the Trump administration because of his erratic and reckless behavior.  Trump put us at risk from 2017-2021; we would be at greater risk if he returned to the White House from 2025-2029.

Trump’s return to the White House would mark a renewal of his war on U.S. governance and democracy from 2017 to 2021.  Two of his targets were the oldest institutions in the country—the Post Office and the Census.  The Post Office was in Trump’s cross hairs because he was told (falsely) that he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton due to widespread mail-in balloting fraud.  He also targeted the Census Bureau, which conducts the census that is key to our representative government, including our state representation in the House of Representatives and the distribution of $1.5 trillion for various public programs.  His politicization of the government had overwhelming support from the congressional Republican government.

Benjamin Franklin acknowledged to an inquiring citizen in Philadelphia in 1776 that the Founding Fathers had created a republic, but it would be up to the American citizenry to maintain it.  Too many authoritarians have been elected, gradually seizing power in an incremental and even legal fashion.  Donald Trump should not be allowed to join the list of authoritarians, such as Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Rodrigo Duterte, Viktor Orban, and Javier Milei, who initially gained power legitimately.  And at the risk of putting too fine a point on it, there are the examples of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler.

The post Never Forget Who Donald Trump Really Is appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Melvin Goodman.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/16/never-forget-who-donald-trump-really-is/feed/ 0 458976 Forget The Kids: Social Media, Congress and Child Safety https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/06/forget-the-kids-social-media-congress-and-child-safety-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/06/forget-the-kids-social-media-congress-and-child-safety-2/#respond Tue, 06 Feb 2024 06:55:19 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=312611 It was a struggle to see how a child’s welfare was relevant in the latest, shrill debates about technology taking place on The Hill.  The Senate Judiciary Committee and the leaders of social media companies were on show to thrash out matters on technology and their threats on January 31 in a hearing titled “Big Tech and the More

The post Forget The Kids: Social Media, Congress and Child Safety appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

]]>

Photo by dole777

It was a struggle to see how a child’s welfare was relevant in the latest, shrill debates about technology taking place on The Hill.  The Senate Judiciary Committee and the leaders of social media companies were on show to thrash out matters on technology and their threats on January 31 in a hearing titled “Big Tech and the Online Child Exploitation Crisis.”  The companies present: X Corp, represented by Linda Yaccarino; TikTok Inc, fronted by Shou Chew; Snap Inc, by Evan Spiegel; Meta and Mark Zuckerberg; and Jason Citron of Discord Inc.

Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) got the ghoulish proceedings underway with a video featuring victims and survivors.  “I was sexually exploited on Facebook,” declares one.  “I was sexually exploited on Instagram,” comes another.  “I was sexually exploited on X.”  And so forth.

Exploitation leads to distress and worse.  “The child that … gets exploited is never the same again,” says a parent.  One lost their son to suicide after being exploited on Facebook.  Then, the failings of indifferent Big Tech operatives are carted out.  “How many more kids will suffer and die because of social media?” goes the tune.  “We need Congress to do something for our children and protect them.”

This supplied Durbin the ideal, moralistic (and moralising) springboard.  And nothing excites those in Congress more than a moral crisis from which much mischief can be made.  There was, he solemnly declared, a “sexual exploitation is a crisis in America.”  In the decade from 2013 to 2023, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) had received and increase from 1,380 cyber tips per day to 100,000 daily reports.  The modern smartphone has become a hellish conduit of exploitation.  “Discord has been used to groom, abduct and abuse children.  Meta’s Instagram helped connect and promote a network of paedophiles.  Snapchat’s disappearing messages have been co-opted by criminals who financially extort young victims.  TikTok has become a ‘platform of choice’ for predators to access, engage, and groom children for abuse”.

From the Republican side, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham saw social media companies in their current design and operation as “dangerous products.  They’re destroying lives, threatening democracy itself.  These companies must be reined in or the worst is yet to come.”

The senators were ploughing familiar ground: the corrosion of mental health including instances of self-harm and suicide, the role of social media in perpetrating a number of crimes (drug dealing, sextortion) and the blissful digital heavens such companies have created for any number of unsavoury cults, ideologies and inclinations.

What, then, of it?  For one thing, Zuckerberg, who was making his eighth appearance at such a hearing, was hardly going to offer anything constructive – at least in a binding sense.  In the month just passed, internal Meta documents revealed a number of concerns from employees that the company’s messaging apps had featured in various instances of child exploitation.  Little was done about it, which was precisely to be expected.

As a useful whipping boy of Congressional outrage, Meta’s CEO provided the perfect platform for senatorial outrage.  Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) could spice the airwaves (and the global social media universe) with his righteous display: “There’s families of victims here today.  Have you apologised to the victims?  Would you like to do so now?”  Zuckerberg, reminded that he was on national television, did the performing seal act, turning around and facing the audience.  A number of photos of deceased children were helpfully offered to torment the guilty soul.  “I’m sorry,” Zuckerberg responded.  “Everything that you all have gone through, it’s terrible.  No one should have to go through the things that your families have suffered and this is why we invest so much and are going to continue doing industry leading efforts to make sure that no one has to go through the types of things your families have had to suffer.”

It was a fantastically bloodless response, filled with the usual Big Tech baubles: industry standards would be met, innovations would be made, investments would follow, and new products of sterling safety engineered.  As Zuckerberg went on to explain to Hawley, “I view my job and the job of our company is building the best tools that we can keep our community safe.”  But the model as to how such companies extract, use, and monetise information – surveillance capitalism – is left untouched.  Hawley’s cosmetic suggestion is to create a compensation fund for victims; the social media business model can continue to operate untrammelled because no member of Congress wants to be tarnished with the anti-corporation brush.  Money always comes first.

Another great threat was also being teased out in the combative questions posed to the social media CEOs.  Their companies have produced hideous, wounding and in some cases lethal products, all of which continue being used by billions, including haranguing, morally indignant politicians and unsuspecting children.  But Congress also showed why it is also a problem to the very people it claims to be protecting.

The form this takes is the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a co-sponsored initiative from Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN).  KOSA ostensibly deals with child safety, intended to empower the attorney general of every state, and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to file lawsuits against apps or websites for failing to “prevent or mitigate” the various harms that supposedly affect children.  Its effect, far from protecting children, will be something quite different, elevating the “duty of care” principle to scrub content that might cause “anxiety”, “depression” and any other number of undesirable behaviours.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation describes KOSA as a censorship bill.  And it is easy to see why, with any item of information or news shared susceptible to being banned or modified for causing distress to children.  “Ultimately,” writes the EFF’s Jason Kelley, “no amendment will change the basic fact that KOSA’s duty of care turns what is meant to be a bill about child safety into a censorship bill that will harm the rights of both adult and minor uses.”

Fight for the Future Director Evan Greer was also deeply unimpressed, telling TechCrunch that, “Dozens of human rights, civil liberties, LGBTQ+ and racial justice groups oppose the reckless legislation being proposed at today’s hearing.”

In an attempt to stream roll the CEOs into supporting the bill, Senator Blumenthal asked where they stood on its merits.  Spiegel and Yaccarino expressed support for KOSA.  Those from TikTok, Meta and Discord dithered and expressed reservations.  Citron was diplomatic.  “We very much think that a national privacy standard would be great.” Chew noted that “some groups have raised some concerns”.  Zuckerberg blandly stated that, “These are nuanced things.”

The hearing of January 31 ended with an open conspiracy against genuine change in the social media ecosystem.  Instead of focusing on privacy and surveillance capitalism, the senators were more interested in the regulation of outrage over undesirable content.  Instead of considering genuine reform, the CEOs made non-binding promises about cosmetic adjustments and fictional industry standards.  Along the way, the children were well and truly forgotten.

The post Forget The Kids: Social Media, Congress and Child Safety appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/06/forget-the-kids-social-media-congress-and-child-safety-2/feed/ 0 457159 Forget the Kids: Social Media, Congress and Child Safety https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/05/forget-the-kids-social-media-congress-and-child-safety/ https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/05/forget-the-kids-social-media-congress-and-child-safety/#respond Mon, 05 Feb 2024 09:00:29 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=147901 It was a struggle to see how a child’s welfare was relevant in the latest, shrill debates about technology taking place on The Hill.  The Senate Judiciary Committee and the leaders of social media companies were on show to thrash out matters on technology and their threats on January 31 in a hearing titled “Big […]

The post Forget the Kids: Social Media, Congress and Child Safety first appeared on Dissident Voice.]]> It was a struggle to see how a child’s welfare was relevant in the latest, shrill debates about technology taking place on The Hill.  The Senate Judiciary Committee and the leaders of social media companies were on show to thrash out matters on technology and their threats on January 31 in a hearing titled “Big Tech and the Online Child Exploitation Crisis.”  The companies present: X Corp, represented by Linda Yaccarino; TikTok Inc, fronted by Shou Chew; Snap Inc, by Evan Spiegel; Meta and Mark Zuckerberg; and Jason Citron of Discord Inc.

Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) got the ghoulish proceedings underway with a video featuring victims and survivors.  “I was sexually exploited on Facebook,” declares one.  “I was sexually exploited on Instagram,” comes another.  “I was sexually exploited on X.”  And so forth.

Exploitation leads to distress and worse.  “The child that … gets exploited is never the same again,” says a parent.  One lost their son to suicide after being exploited on Facebook.  Then, the failings of indifferent Big Tech operatives are carted out.  “How many more kids will suffer and die because of social media?” goes the tune.  “We need Congress to do something for our children and protect them.”

This supplied Durbin the ideal, moralistic (and moralising) springboard.  And nothing excites those in Congress more than a moral crisis from which much mischief can be made.  There was, he solemnly declared, a “sexual exploitation is a crisis in America.” In the decade from 2013 to 2023, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) had received and increase from 1,380 cyber tips per day to 100,000 daily reports.  The modern smartphone has become a hellish conduit of exploitation. “Discord has been used to groom, abduct and abuse children. Meta’s Instagram helped connect and promote a network of paedophiles.  Snapchat’s disappearing messages have been co-opted by criminals who financially extort young victims. TikTok has become a ‘platform of choice’ for predators to access, engage, and groom children for abuse”.

From the Republican side, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham saw social media companies in their current design and operation as “dangerous products.  They’re destroying lives, threatening democracy itself. These companies must be reined in or the worst is yet to come.”

The senators were ploughing familiar ground: the corrosion of mental health including instances of self-harm and suicide, the role of social media in perpetrating a number of crimes (drug dealing, sextortion) and the blissful digital heavens such companies have created for any number of unsavoury cults, ideologies and inclinations.

What, then, of it?  For one thing, Zuckerberg, who was making his eighth appearance at such a hearing, was hardly going to offer anything constructive – at least in a binding sense.  In the month just passed, internal Meta documents revealed a number of concerns from employees that the company’s messaging apps had featured in various instances of child exploitation.  Little was done about it, which was precisely to be expected.

As a useful whipping boy of Congressional outrage, Meta’s CEO provided the perfect platform for senatorial outrage.  Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) could spice the airwaves (and the global social media universe) with his righteous display: “There’s families of victims here today.  Have you apologised to the victims?  Would you like to do so now?”  Zuckerberg, reminded that he was on national television, did the performing seal act, turning around and facing the audience.  A number of photos of deceased children were helpfully offered to torment the guilty soul.  “I’m sorry,” Zuckerberg responded.  “Everything that you all have gone through, it’s terrible.  No one should have to go through the things that your families have suffered and this is why we invest so much and are going to continue doing industry leading efforts to make sure that no one has to go through the types of things your families have had to suffer.”

It was a fantastically bloodless response, filled with the usual Big Tech baubles: industry standards would be met, innovations would be made, investments would follow, and new products of sterling safety engineered.  As Zuckerberg went on to explain to Hawley, “I view my job and the job of our company is building the best tools that we can keep our community safe.”  But the model as to how such companies extract, use, and monetise information – surveillance capitalism – is left untouched.  Hawley’s cosmetic suggestion is to create a compensation fund for victims; the social media business model can continue to operate untrammelled because no member of Congress wants to be tarnished with the anti-corporation brush.  Money always comes first.

Another great threat was also being teased out in the combative questions posed to the social media CEOs.  Their companies have produced hideous, wounding and in some cases lethal products, all of which continue being used by billions, including haranguing, morally indignant politicians and unsuspecting children.  But Congress also showed why it is also a problem to the very people it claims to be protecting.

The form this takes is the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a co-sponsored initiative from Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN).  KOSA ostensibly deals with child safety, intended to empower the attorney general of every state, and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to file lawsuits against apps or websites for failing to “prevent or mitigate” the various harms that supposedly affect children.  Its effect, far from protecting children, will be something quite different, elevating the “duty of care” principle to scrub content that might cause “anxiety”, “depression” and any other number of undesirable behaviours.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation describes KOSA as a censorship bill.  And it is easy to see why, with any item of information or news shared susceptible to being banned or modified for causing distress to children.  “Ultimately,” writes the EFF’s Jason Kelley, “no amendment will change the basic fact that KOSA’s duty of care turns what is meant to be a bill about child safety into a censorship bill that will harm the rights of both adult and minor uses.”

Fight for the Future Director Evan Greer was also deeply unimpressed, telling TechCrunch that, “Dozens of human rights, civil liberties, LGBTQ+ and racial justice groups oppose the reckless legislation being proposed at today’s hearing.”

In an attempt to stream roll the CEOs into supporting the bill, Senator Blumenthal asked where they stood on its merits.  Spiegel and Yaccarino expressed support for KOSA.  Those from TikTok, Meta and Discord dithered and expressed reservations.  Citron was diplomatic.  “We very much think that a national privacy standard would be great.” Chew noted that “some groups have raised some concerns”.  Zuckerberg blandly stated that, “These are nuanced things.”

The hearing of January 31 ended with an open conspiracy against genuine change in the social media ecosystem.  Instead of focusing on privacy and surveillance capitalism, the senators were more interested in the regulation of outrage over undesirable content.  Instead of considering genuine reform, the CEOs made non-binding promises about cosmetic adjustments and fictional industry standards.  Along the way, the children were well and truly forgotten.

The post Forget the Kids: Social Media, Congress and Child Safety first appeared on Dissident Voice.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/05/forget-the-kids-social-media-congress-and-child-safety/feed/ 0 456887 Rishi Sunak wants you to forget the last 13 years https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/04/rishi-sunak-wants-you-to-forget-the-last-13-years/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/04/rishi-sunak-wants-you-to-forget-the-last-13-years/#respond Wed, 04 Oct 2023 16:02:16 +0000 https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/rishi-sunak-conservative-conference-speech-13-years/
This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Ruby Lott-Lavigna.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/10/04/rishi-sunak-wants-you-to-forget-the-last-13-years/feed/ 0 431970 Work Won’t Love You Back: Forget About the Fandom; 
Focus on the Movement https://www.radiofree.org/2023/09/26/work-wont-love-you-back-forget-about-the-fandom-focus-on-the-movement/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/09/26/work-wont-love-you-back-forget-about-the-fandom-focus-on-the-movement/#respond Tue, 26 Sep 2023 13:00:00 +0000 https://progressive.org/magazine/forget-about-the-fandom-jaffe-20230926/
This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Sarah Jaffe.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/09/26/work-wont-love-you-back-forget-about-the-fandom-focus-on-the-movement/feed/ 0 429880 Forget eco-activists: This climate novel stars an oil industry shill https://grist.org/culture/lydia-kiesling-mobility-novel-climate-fiction-oil/ https://grist.org/culture/lydia-kiesling-mobility-novel-climate-fiction-oil/#respond Fri, 01 Sep 2023 08:30:00 +0000 https://grist.org/?p=617551 When people think about “climate fiction,” they tend to imagine the speculative sci-fi of writers like Kim Stanley Robinson, or perhaps the eco-anxiety that pervades a book like Jenny Offill’s Weather. These are books where the visible effects of the climate crisis dominate the plot or at least the thought patterns of the characters. Lydia Kiesling’s Mobility, which came out last month, is a different kind of climate novel: It tells the story of a young woman who doesn’t think that much about the climate crisis at all, despite her ancillary role in causing it. 

The protagonist, Bunny Glenn, works for a small, family-owned oil company, first as an administrative assistant and later as a public-relations executive focused on advancing the interests of “women in energy.” She only took the job because she couldn’t find a better one, and she feels vaguely that there’s something wrong with what she’s doing. Nevertheless, she doesn’t have any plans of quitting. In the words of Gillian Welch, she wants to do right, just not right now.

Though Mobility looks superficially like a story about one woman’s aimless young adulthood and middling professional career, the question of Bunny’s complicity in the destruction of the planet can’t help gushing up, complicating the book’s tale of class anxiety and alienation. Kiesling doesn’t force her preoccupation with climate change on the reader, but she does challenge them to look beyond Bunny’s blinkered consciousness and spot the two-way relationship between individual decisions and the slow progress of planetary collapse. 

Kiesling’s first novel, The Golden State, narrates a 10-day span in the life of a young mother who moves out to the California high desert on her own to grapple with her new life as a mother. Right from the start, Mobility takes a different tack: Rather than a one-week snapshot of a young woman’s life, the novel charts that woman’s trajectory over the course of several decades, sweeping from the past through the present and into a not-too-distant future.

But if Mobility is a bildungsroman, it’s a somewhat uneventful one. The narrative opens on Bunny as a teenager in Baku, Azerbaijan, where her father has a Foreign Service posting. Diplomats and oil company officials have descended on the Central Asian nation, jockeying for a share of its all-important Caspian Sea petroleum, but Bunny isn’t thinking much about the “the aboveground oil pipes that snaked through the dirt roads and knobby paved streets” of Bakuʻs urban sprawl. She’s more focused on Eddie, the documentary filmmaker she has a crush on, and Charlie Kovak, a renegade journalist who looks a little too long in her direction.

The wax remains in Bunny’s ears until well into her twenties, by which time she has moved back in with her mother in Beaumont, Texas, a city home to the enormous Motiva oil refinery complex. Fresh off a breakup and stripped of career prospects thanks to the 2008 recession, she stumbles into doing administrative work for an engineering company, then moves over to the new “energy solutions” unit of a domestic oil company, which is starting to invest in solar and other non-fossil technologies. The oil company, privately held and family-run, comes off as a miniature version of Hunt, complete with a patriarchal executive who resembles industry titan H.L. Hunt. Bunny soon makes herself indispensable to that boss, Frank Turnbridge, whoʻs fond of saying that his company thinks in “geologic time.”

The contrast between individual human lives and larger economic and geological forces is omnipresent in the book, sometimes in Bunny’s thoughts and sometimes in more subtle aesthetic juxtaposition, such as when Bunny orders a chicken Caesar at a work lunch in Beaumont and looks out at a “golf course … pale with heat and refinery haze.” The three sections of the book are labeled “Upstream,” “Midstream,” and “Downstream,” oil industry terms for different stages of the production cycle, and each smaller chapter opens with the index price of U.S. crude oil in the year the chapter takes place. As a result, the reader is reminded that not only economies but also personal lives follow the movements of global commodity markets. By the same token, the “mobility” of the book’s title could refer to Bunnyʻs personal mobility through the class strata of Texas or the spatial mobility we gain by burning oil in cars and airplanes.

In addition to following Bunny’s entanglement with oil, the narrative also follows her evolution into a pathbreaker for professional women. During the first half of the book, we find her on the outside of conversations between more knowledgeable men, first the expat guys in Baku and then the oil buffs at parties in Houston. But by the end of the book Bunny is at an all-women roundtable at a big conference back in Baku, holding her own with other successful professionals from BP and the American embassy who are gathered together for “the promulgation of various agendas.”

Kiesling herself cares a lot about climate change — she’s written an essay about wildfire for the Wall Street Journal and volunteered with Portland mutual aid groups during that city’s heat wave — and Bunny serves as a kind of alternate version of her author. Sheʻs more or less the same age as Kiesling, and both came of age as the child of a prominent diplomat. But the two take very different paths through the labyrinth of millennial existence. Instead of becoming a writer with left-wing politics who lives in a liberal West Coast city, Bunny becomes a materialistic professional in Texas who talks to finance guys at boring weddings. (The descriptions of bourgeois Houston’s rooftop parties and ugly skyscrapers ring true, though one pities Bunny’s commitment to trying all of the cityʻs ethnic cuisines “in some small portion,” given the average size of an entree in that city.)

Almost as if she can hear Kiesling breathing down her neck, Bunny tries to justify her choices, parroting her bossʻs pro-oil arguments in her conversations with her brother’s environmentalist girlfriend. When she loses the argument, she goes for a swim and reposes in the comfort of her industry expertise, “thinking rebelliously about soft salt domes and ancient stones and flat-bottomed barges transported in pieces across the earth.”

As it follows Bunny through the garden of forking paths, the narrative asks us to reflect on all the unintended consequences of mere existence. Like all of us, Bunny comes into contact throughout her life with any number of random people, from petty colleagues in the engineering firmʻs admin pool to one-night stands at the wedding of a childhood friend. Neither she nor the reader can ever know what effect she has on the course of those people’s lives. In just the same way, she can’t recognize her own role in the destruction of the earth — can’t see that after sowing the wind at her women in energy conferences she will someday reap the whirlwind in the form of heat waves and hurricanes. Even someone like this, the book seems to say, has a fearful agency. When describing Bunny’s mother’s new vegetable garden, the narrator notes that “it had taken very little time, in the scheme of things, to totally remake the earth.”

Or maybe not. Toward the end, after a climactic return to Baku and an encounter with an old flame, the timeline starts to move faster, and the external world pushes in to drown out Bunny’s internal monologue. The narrative becomes a haze of headlines about oil and gas mergers, presidential elections, pandemics, and climate disasters. Is this a sign that Bunny’s habitual ignorance is at last giving way to a more defined political consciousness? Or is the narrative pulling away from its head-in-the-sand protagonist, reminding us that the story of the earthʻs collapse is much bigger than mere human emotions? 

The novel’s final feint raises a deep set of questions about how to depict climate change in fiction. After first posing as a novel of slow and delayed self-discovery, Mobility at the end almost seems to adopt the structure of classical tragedy, forcing Bunny to live in the world that her work for old Turnbridge’s oil company helped to create. She “wonders whether she would see her father and brother and sister-in-law again,” Kiesling tells us in the final chapter. “Flying was out of the question for Elizabeth; the turbulence had gotten too bad … they could always drive the van somewhere to get out of the smoke for a while.”

It’s unclear whether the external world is taking revenge on Bunny for her actions, a la Sophocles, or whether Bunny just happens to have been alive during a specific chapter of ecological collapse — in other words, it’s unclear whether we should think about the narrative in human time or in geologic time. For Kiesling to provide an answer to this question would also be for her to pass judgment on Bunny, and she avoids doing so. There’s a lesson in there for many climate-conscious readers in a country that has emitted the largest share of historical carbon. However Bunny’s life may differ from our own, we too are both guilty and not.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Forget eco-activists: This climate novel stars an oil industry shill on Sep 1, 2023.


This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

]]> https://grist.org/culture/lydia-kiesling-mobility-novel-climate-fiction-oil/feed/ 0 424354 A Story We Shouldn’t Forget: On Nixon, Trump and the Perils of Pardoning the Unpardonable https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/11/a-story-we-shouldnt-forget-on-nixon-trump-and-the-perils-of-pardoning-the-unpardonable/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/11/a-story-we-shouldnt-forget-on-nixon-trump-and-the-perils-of-pardoning-the-unpardonable/#respond Fri, 11 Aug 2023 15:59:15 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/further/a-story-we-shouldn-t-forget-on-nixon-trump-and-pardoning-the-unpardonable

This week marked almost 50 years since Richard Nixon tersely gave up the presidency after he was charged with obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and other offenses likely familiar to a mouthy, crooked real estate developer who later wrote the disgraced leader he was nonetheless "a great man." When Nixon was pardoned for his crimes, many say the action paved the way for the deplorable fan and wannabe tyrant now deemed somehow both far lesser yet more pernicious than Tricky Dick ever was.

"Forty-nine years ago, on August 9, 1974, Richard Nixon wrote one line to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: 'I hereby resign the Office of President of the United States,'" notes historian Heather Cox Richardson in her Letters From An American. In late July, the House Judiciary Committee had voted to recommend Nixon be impeached for crimes connected to his attempt to cover up his involvement in the 1972 burglary of the DNC headquarters at D.C.'s Watergate Hotel, part of a "dirty tricks" effort to rig the 1972 election. When a "smoking-gun" tape revealed Nixon was part of both the cover-up and even the plot to bug Democratic strategists, his then-relatively-law-biding allies abandoned the guy who kept insisting, "I'm not a crook," though he clearly was. On the night of Aug. 7, Richardson writes, "a group of Republican lawmakers led by Arizona senator Barry Goldwater met with Nixon and told him the House would vote to impeach him and the Senate would vote to convict...Nixon decided to step down." Although Nixon did not admit guilt, his replacement Gerald Ford soon granted him “a full, free, and absolute pardon,” arguing the trial of a former president would "cause prolonged and divisive debate." Yeah maybe, but it could always be worse.

And it soon was. Just 15 years later, Richardson notes, more crooks were committing more crimes when Reagan's National Security Council ignored a Congressional ban on aid to the Nicaraguan Contras fighting Daniel Ortega's Socialist government and sold arms to Iran, which funneled the profits to the Contras. Even after the story broke, GOP officials kept criming, shredding and funneling; 14 were indicted and most were convicted, but George H. W. Bush still pardoned them "on the advice of his attorney general William Barr. (Yes, that William Barr)." At the time, Lawrence Walsh, the independent prosecutor in the case, warned that the pardons (again) "undermine (the) principle that no man is above the law,” demonstrating "that powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office, deliberately abusing the public trust without consequences." And so it went. Today, an entirely lawless GOP now shamelessly supports a colossally unqualified tinpot-mobster and one-man crime wave facing his fourth indictment for a harrowing list of offenses that would make Nixon blush, including stealing classified documents and hatching "an astonishing" scheme - fake electors! - to overturn an election through a "bold," violent and wildly illegal strategy.

Unsurprisingly, it turns out the new crook thought the old crook - the last president to face anything like his current legal jeopardy - was way cool. A 2020 exhibit of letters between presidents featured a decade-long correspondence in the 1980s - "Dear Donald," "Dear Mr. President" - that today somehow summons the daft "Hi Barbie!", "Hi Barbie!" of Gerwig's movie in its gonzo inanity. Pat Nixon thought Trump looked like "a winner" on TV; Trump, ever the pathetic sycophant, framed and hung the compliment in his office in Trump Tower, where he hoped (in vain) the Nixons would come live because he admired the slimy guy obsessed with "ratfucking" his "enemies" as "one of this country’s great men." (Pot/Kettle/redux). The two men, many have noted, did share many qualities. They were two pathologically insecure "authoritarian personalities (who) craved the same thing: validation." They both distrusted and were despised by the media, the left and political elites; both "played off the haters for political gain"; both adopted a them-and-us playbook, touting the need for a "silent majority" of "real Americans" to defeat radicals, feminists and vocal "others" seeking to destroy (their white male rich vision of) America, even if it took shredding the law and democratic traditions to do it.

Then again, for all their shared vengeful urges to "screw" their enemies, Trump is not Nixon, in part because "Nixon was a winner." Trump is, "at best, a smaller, weaker, more vacuous version" of Nixon, writes one pundit; another argues he's "a shadow of what Nixon was as a president and a politician"; notes one headline, "Both Lied, One Had Accomplishments." Nixon had an actual (albeit rabidly anti-communist) world view, and did things: He opened up relations with China, negotiated the first nuclear arms limitation treaty, created the EPA, ultimately, belatedly, bloodily ended the Vietnam War, and resigned to save the country (and himself) further calamity. Trump is a loser who only cares about and believes in himself, kills everything he touches - see COVID - is fixated on clinging to power no matter the cost to the "hellhole" country he's helped shape, and en route has caused damage "exponentially greater than anything Nixon did." In last year's new foreword to their seminal, Watergate-era All the Presidents' Men, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein cite the Jan. 6 Capitol attack to call Trump "the first seditious president in our history." Pursuing his "diabolical instincts" in his manic effort to retain power, they argue, his deceptions have "exceeded even Nixon's imagination."

Still, Nixon's corrupt legacy is ongoing. Trump's latest charges are two counts of obstruction of justice for trying to erase security footage - aka destroy evidence - at Mar-A-Hell-Go; he ignored a key Nixon lesson: It's not the crime, it's the coverup. He also seems to have missed the memo about conspiracies: "You have to make sure everyone keeps their mouth shut.” See Michael Cohen, and likely more. As he doggedly thrashes through a now-ravaged democracy, he keeps a demented base but loses others. Judge Michael Luttig, a "conservative's conservative" heralded for his right-wing rulings, now predicts Trump's crimes will become "singular infamous events in American history" that have "corrupted American democracy" and its elections. Last year, he told the House Jan. 6 Committee Trump was "a clear and present danger"; today, he's even more so. As a result, he says, "there is no Republican Party" - a vital, second, sparring assemblage - and "American democracy is in grave peril." In 1969, Nixon famously proclaimed, "A man is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits." Yes, well. During his impeachment and the inevitable summoning of Nixon's ghost, Trump furiously insisted, "He left. I don’t leave. A big difference." Not that big: just worse. John Dean on the chicanery of aspiring despots: "It’s a story we shouldn’t forget."

The brief, historic resignation letter of Richard Nixon Nixon resigns, Aug. 9, 1974Photo from National Archives









This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/08/11/a-story-we-shouldnt-forget-on-nixon-trump-and-the-perils-of-pardoning-the-unpardonable/feed/ 0 418643 Can’t Forget the Motor City https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/30/cant-forget-the-motor-city/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/30/cant-forget-the-motor-city/#respond Fri, 30 Jun 2023 05:47:00 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=287416 I have to be honest. I have never considered Detroit to be a major center of US musical culture. An outpost perhaps, but not a center like New York, Los Angeles, or San Francisco. However, after reading DJ Joe Molloy’s recently released book Acid Detroit: A Psychedelic Story of Motor City Music, I stand happily More

The post Can’t Forget the Motor City appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ron Jacobs.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/30/cant-forget-the-motor-city/feed/ 0 408457 ‘I will never forget the pain of being beaten’ https://www.rfa.org/english/news/myanmar/torture-06222023181518.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/myanmar/torture-06222023181518.html#respond Thu, 22 Jun 2023 22:17:09 +0000 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/myanmar/torture-06222023181518.html She knew she was being sought by authorities for reporting on anti-junta protests. 

In the seven months since the military had carried out a coup d’etat in February 2021, Myanmar had descended into chaos, Her husband, a former journalist, had been detained for four days before being released.

Fearing for her safety, Thuzar San decided to buy a bus ticket from Yangon for the Thai border town of Mae Sot, due to depart on Sept. 2, 2021.

But two days before she was to leave, she was arrested by police while her taxi was stopped at a traffic light by plain clothes police officers.

“We were asked to put our hands on our heads on the side of the road while they searched the car and then they handcuffed us, forced us to get into a truck at gunpoint, and blindfolded us,” she told Radio Free Asia. 

Thuzar was one of the locally-hired reporters at RFA Burmese Service’s Yangon office from 2013-2014.

“There was another woman with us. When we arrived at the [interrogation] center, they said, ‘Let the lady exit first,’ so I asked if it was me they were talking about. All of a sudden, they slapped me in the face.”

During that first night, Thuzar’s interrogators subjected her to brutal mental and physical abuse in a bid to learn what she knew about the junta opposition and other journalists who had covered the protests.

“Four guys circled me and whipped me with a bundle of three [bamboo] canes bound together,” she said. “They asked me the names of the two young men I met during the protest. I was friends with them on Facebook, but I didn’t know much about them.”

Her captors beat her five times with a bamboo sapling that evening and said the wounds on her thighs took “more than a year” to heal.

“I will never forget the pain of being beaten with the bamboo sapling,” she said.

Ruthlessly whipped

Later, she was taken from her cell, blindfolded and led outside, where she was made to kneel on the pavement. Again, her captors beat her, demanding to know how she planned to travel to Thailand, which organizations she had ties to and which reporters planned to flee along with her.

“Three guys circled me and whipped me with canes – it was so painful,” she said. “This time, they pierced my flesh with the [sharpened] tip of the bamboo sapling and it was agonizing.”

ENG_BUR_BloggerTortured_06222023.2.jpg
Myanmar freelance journalist Thuzar San was tortured after being arrested. Credit: A Hla Lay Thuzar Facebook

When Thuzar told the men that she had nothing to divulge about her fellow reporters, they threatened to videotape her forced confession as “evidence” that she was a junta informant and hold her daughter hostage.

“They told me that they could make me talk and said, ‘We’ll bring in your daughter and beat her in front of you,” she said. “After that, I couldn’t stop crying. Finally, they sent me back to my cell.”

Over the course of several days, Thuzar was interrogated by several people. 

On the ninth day of her detention, her captors took her fingerprints and sent a statement to the local police station, saying that she took part in anti-junta protests while covering the event as a reporter.

To Insein Prison

She was kept in police custody for nearly a month on charges of reporting fake news and inciting the public against the government. On Nov. 22, 2021, she was sentenced to two years in Yangon’s notorious Insein Prison with hard labor.

Thuzar described life at Insein Prison as a constant violation of her human rights.

“I stayed in Female Ward No. 9, which was like a hall with closed circuit cameras installed in it,” she said. “We had to change our clothes and use the toilet there [in front of the cameras]. The prison officials regularly scolded us and used harsh words. Our rights were severely violated.”

Thuzar was released as part of a general amnesty on Jan. 4, 2023, after spending 15 months in prison. 

As she was no longer safe in Myanmar, she fled to Thailand along with her family in March.

While she feels unmoored as a refugee in a foreign country, Thuzar said she stays strong thinking about the sacrifices of those who have given their lives in opposition to junta rule.

She vowed to return to Myanmar as soon as possible so that she can join together with those fighting for democracy and a better future in her home country.

Translated by Htin Aung Kyaw. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.


This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Khin Khin Ei for RFA Burmese.

]]> https://www.rfa.org/english/news/myanmar/torture-06222023181518.html/feed/ 0 406196 Forget the University: Gift Cards, Professionalism and the Australian Academy https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/20/forget-the-university-gift-cards-professionalism-and-the-australian-academy/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/20/forget-the-university-gift-cards-professionalism-and-the-australian-academy/#respond Tue, 20 Jun 2023 09:01:32 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=141261 Dear future students wishing to come to Australia and study: don’t. The gurgling, decaying system is, on a regular basis, being exposed for what it is. If it is not students being exploited, its academics being manipulated to the point of ruinous ill-health. True, not all universities are equally rotten in the constellation of corporate manipulation, but each one is rotten in a slightly different way.

The nature of the rot starts at the top – a conventional wisdom. And that rot features workloads of an unrealistic nature (too many classes; unrecognised grading efforts; questionable budgets), all padding for the bloated managerial class that guiltlessly loots. It helps, as well, that most Australian universities have Human Resources departments larger than most academic departments. They are the stormtroopers for the managerial gauleiters, ensuring that dissenters are kept quiet, and anyone wishing to challenge the status quo kept in straitjacket and check.

Much has already been made of the enormous casualisation of the academic workforce in Australia. (One figure suggests that 70% of university workers in the sector are on casual or fixed term contracts.) They are the precariat, the equivalent of altar children whose bottoms, bodies and minds are passed around from course to course to be used by the relevant coordinator, program manager and associate dean for a finite duration.

The nature of such sessionalisation has seen an interesting twist of late. The hand-to-mouth precariat are not wanted – at least in certain institutions. Universities suddenly claim to have no money in the kitty to pay modest sums to sessional workers they have sadistically abused for years. This is despite huge financial windfalls that arose even as the global pandemic was raging. In the post-COVID landscape, the assumption is that ongoing academics (tenure is not a concept of any worth down under) will take charge, seize the reins, and teach themselves into the ground.

But as departments, schools and university sections are racketeering enterprises, those wishing to cosy up to obese, overly remunerated managers may be rewarded for their flabby morals. (Arse-crawling really ought to be a degree, but why theorise it, when the praxis is sorted out?) The crawlers can avoid teaching. They can assume administrative posts and discuss administration with others in similar administrative posts. They can dream, fiddle and fondle spreadsheets, conjuring up miracles from the ether. Their minds devoid of cerebration, they are the perfect adjutants and servants for the managerial institution.

As for research, this only matters if it can be pegged to the industrial grant making complex, which is only useful in producing more grants. The cosmos of receiving such awards is only relevant, not from the actual material it produces in terms of what knowledge, but for the process of gaining the award. Money can then go back into undeserving pockets, with recipient academics, to use a popular and atrocious term “buying themselves out” of teaching duties. As one Dean of no stature or relevance insisted with dull conviction, “It does not matter how many papers you write, or how many books you author – your work allocation is the same as the next one.”

A half-wit sloth with one publication authored with several other dunces deserves the same academic praise as the single author of numerous pieces, with a profile that is somewhat larger than the standard 200 metre radius worshipped in insular towers. The die, it would seem, is cast, before you realise an awful reality: the Dean wants you to be on her level, that of the spreadsheeting numbed wonder who draws in a fortnightly salary with minimal cognition – except to justify the dictates of the satanic college she serves.

Amidst this messy state of affairs, Australian universities continue engaging in that practice most heinous: the underpayment of staff, notably those on temporary contracts. The payment rates for casual academics – and, in some cases, ongoing staff – is nothing short of scandalous. In March 2022, the Senate Standing Committee on Economics noted that 21 out of Australia’s 40 universities had been guilty of underpaying staff.

So why express horror or surprise at the latest revelation that gift cards are being used to pay academic staff? An investigation by the Australian publication Crikey, using Freedom of Information, found this to be particularly evident at the University of Technology Sydney.

According to the report, “one faculty debated the use of gift cards as payment for academics as recently as last year.” A Microsoft Teams message from a human resources official also stated in October last year, with some agitation, that the faculty of health wanted “to have another run at the gift card idea.”

The UTS public relations team was immediately stung into action. “Gift cards are used at UTS, as they are at any other organisations, as a token of appreciation for non-employees who volunteer their time at the university, for example, as research participants, or as members of events panels or as one-off guest speakers,” reasoned one spokesperson.

The Senate Standing Committee similarly found that various “casual academic staff have been paid in gift certificates, instead of the wages, loadings, leave and superannuation to which they are entitled.” Dr Hayley Singer, a member of the University of Melbourne Casuals’ Network, told the committee that she had “contested this at the time because I know I can’t pay rent, pay for transport or pay for medical bills with gift cards. This is how casual and insecurely employed academics are treated when we bring our professionalism and our expertise onto campus and into the classroom”.

If only Singer realised that the whole function of the modern managerial university is to eschew and excoriate professionalism of any sort, notably in the areas that give education its greatest worth. To be professional is to be subversive, thereby making that individual dispensable. Best join the spread sheeters.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/06/20/forget-the-university-gift-cards-professionalism-and-the-australian-academy/feed/ 0 405324 Death’s Secretary Tries to Forget on Cape Cod https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/22/deaths-secretary-tries-to-forget-on-cape-cod/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/22/deaths-secretary-tries-to-forget-on-cape-cod/#respond Mon, 22 May 2023 14:26:54 +0000 https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=140401

We have come to Cape Cod for a few days to forget the man-made world that is too much with us. I have asked my forgettery to get to work. As my childhood friends used to say to me, “Eddy spaghetti, use you forgetty.” The adults had no idea what they meant. Many still do not.

Here slowness reigns and forgetting seems possible, even if for just a few days.  In mid-May, the beaches are deserted except for the swooping gulls, the sandpipers prancing across the sand, and a few seals eyeing you from just off-shore.  An occasional frigate bird glides past. The wind rushes through your ears, making conversation almost impossible.

But no words are needed here, for the ocean speaks its own language and the tales it tells are deep.  You can only hear them if you shut up and listen. It utters reminders of the immensity of creation and the puniness of human aspirations. The sea dismisses with a roar the pretensions to power of the Lilliputians.

One minute it glistens in the bright blue sunshine and says all is well; then suddenly, as now, the sky and sea turn very dark and foreboding, the increased wind whipping the whitecaps into a maniacal threat.  There are limits, it wails, and do not try to exceed them, for if, in your hubris, you attempt it, you will discover that when you think you’re on the top, you’ll be heading for the bottom.

As the Greeks knew so well, Nemesis awaits your response.

If you stand on the forty mile long strand of the sandy outer beach and look out to sea, you realize that no matter how well you sail through life, and how deftly you tack your boat, you are not ultimately in control.  Those who seek to control others lack the spirit of the wind, the unseen mystery through which we move.

Henry David Thoreau stood on this beach looking out to sea and wrote:

A man may stand there and put all America behind him.

I wish it were so simple.  To forget the man-made world that is too much with us isn’t easy.  Ironically, it can only be briefly forgotten, for when we come to a beautiful and wild sea shore like Cape Cod when rarely a soul is around, the contemplation of its majesty implicitly draws us to compare it to human endeavors.  I look out across the wide Atlantic and see not just its wild power but the feeble pretensions of the Atlanticist countries that think they can still control the world.  Their illusions die hard as their sand castle empire crumbles before the incoming waves.

And here on this long stretch between bay and ocean, it is hard to forget that 10,000 years before the Pilgrims came ashore, the native peoples lived here and were eventually driven from their land.  Not far from where I stand sits the Nauset Light house, named for the Nauset original free people that once lived here.  You can travel all across the United States and even if you wish to forget, there are constant reminders of the genocide of the native peoples by the European settlers.  You bow your head in shameful remembrance.

Of course, to forget, it is crucial to remember to try to forget, and in doing so you are caught in the human web of thought.

We tell ourselves, let us go then, you and I, to contemplate the sea and sky, to let go of all the world’s woes and pack up our sorrows and give them to the elements as we vacate our minds.  Then – ouch! – we are jerked back by the sight of a dead sea gull on the sand or a plaque informing you that the long stretch of outer beach you walk with the ghost of Thoreau was preserved as the Cape Cod National Seashore by President Kennedy in 1961.  You find yourself walking with many ghosts: dead writers, sailors drowned in shipwrecks, ancient dead horseshoe crabs along the strand, and an assassinated president who loved this sea and land.  You realize that nature, while beautifully majestic, is also a cruel taskmaster, but not as cruel as humans, so many of whom seem to revel in killing.

You struggle to dismiss the thoughts associated with these aperçus, yet you immediately wonder if they are auguries of past events or harbingers of something else.  You feel you have been ambushed by another reality.  You hear Billy Joel’s words from his historical song, We Didn’t Start the Fire, “JFK blown away, what else do I have to say.”

You is I, of course, and although these words are addressed to those who might read them, I am also writing for myself, and I sense my word usage was a way to distance myself from what I sometimes find hard to accept: that for some reason of character or experience or both, it is my fate to be unable to escape for long from what my perceptions suggest to me.  Wherever I have gone on that strange word “vacation,” I have been trailed by thoughts that others may consider inappropriate for the occasion.  Un-vacation thoughts.  Wherever I have traveled I have always felt like William Blake as he wandered through each chartered street of London:

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear

Is it a blessing or curse?  I don’t know.  Such knowing is overrated.  My father, an eloquent and brilliant man with deep religious faith, used to end his letters to me with the words: quién sabe (who knows)?

There is, however, another form of knowing that is vastly underrated; it is historical, a knowledge of history that illuminates the present.  I mentioned the Nauset people who lived on Cape Cod when the Pilgrims first temporarily dropped anchor in what is now called Provincetown Harbor.  The Nauset people’s story, like those of the other native people’s across the United States, is tied to the U.S. history of empire in significant ways.

This country was conceived in the blood of all the original free peoples who lived here for eons.  They were massacred to make way for the white technologists who sent their iron horses west as they slaughtered the horse riding nations – including the Pueblo, Pawnee, Comanche and Lakota – and other natives who went by shanks mare.

This history is crucial knowledge, for without it one cannot grasp the demonic nature of today’s U.S. wars throughout the world.  The history has always been demonic.  Nemesis is surely watching now, for what began in the blood of others, has a tendency to blow back on those who first unleashed the fire.  Those of us alive today might not have started the fire, but if we don’t know and recognize its long-term spiritual effects, we can’t understand today’s U.S. provoked war against Russia via Ukraine or much else.

If you wish to praise the American Revolution, you should be sure to emphasize its demonic side.  The mythology of the shining city on the hill needs to be abandoned.  American exceptionalism needs to be jettisoned together with reminders of Washington and Jefferson, both rich slave holders. There are no exceptional countries.  The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution read beautifully on paper as ideals, but those who promoted them were far from it.

Is it exceptional to massacre the native peoples and steal their land?

Is it exceptional to have built an economy on the backs of slaves kidnapped from Africa?

Is it exceptional to plunder foreign lands and make them part of your own?

Is it exceptional to wage endless foreign wars, assassinate at will, and steal the resources of other people to fuel a deranged consumer society?

Is it exceptional to grant full freedom to criminal corporations to pollute the land and water?

Is it exceptional to create endless crises and use propaganda to transfer vast sums of wealth from regular people to the super rich?

Exceptional perhaps, but only in the sense that other past empires considered themselves god-like and immune to Nemesis’s warning of retribution for such crimes?

A dark wind is blowing across the beach now. The sand stings. I see a storm coming, so we will leave for now and go to the nearest restaurant where we will order a dozen oysters for a buck a piece and drink some wine to enjoy our last day here.  When the dozen are gone, perhaps another dozen will taste even better.  All will be well for a small slice of time. I will remember to forget.

I might later remember a photo of Gabriel García Márquez’s face, the look of a bon vivant who told stories to preserve the mystery of our ordinary, extraordinary lives. The fierce journalist who exposed the mystifications that are used by the powerful to deny regular people their democratic rights.  A man who could enjoy life and oppose oppression.

If you can believe it, I will remember that he spoke of “the mission assigned to us by fate.”  And that the great English essayist John Berger says of him, when comparing his face to that of Rembrandt’s blind Homer:

There is nothing pretentious in this comparison: we, Death’s secretaries, all carry the same sense of duties, the same oblique shame (as we have survived, the best have departed) and the same obscure pride which belongs to us personally no more than the stories we tell.

Berger adds that Death’s secretaries are handed a file by Death that is filled with sheets of black paper which they can somehow read and out of which they make stories for the living.  No matter how fantastic they may seem, only one’s incredulity blocks one from entering their truths.

JFK had a secretary named Lincoln, Evelyn Lincoln, who late one night when tidying up his desk, found a slip of paper in his handwriting on the floor. It wasn’t black. On it was written a prayer Kennedy loved. It was a message from Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln: “I know there is a God – and I see a storm coming. If he has a place for me, I believe that I am ready.”

It’s worth remembering that was soon after the Bay of Pigs when Kennedy said he wanted “to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds,” (As reported by Tom Wicker, John W. Finney,Max Frankel, E. W. Kensworthy, “CIA: Maker of Policy or Tool?” New York Times, April 25, 1966, p 20.) [“The Real Story Behind That JFK Quote About Destroying the CIA” — DV ed] and that he had just returned from a meeting with Nikita Khrushchev where he was shocked by Khrushchev’s apparent insouciance to an accelerating threat of nuclear war.

Death’s secretary can’t forget.

And yet those oysters.  Their taste upon the tongue!  So exquisite!  The sea’s sweetness in every swallow.


This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/22/deaths-secretary-tries-to-forget-on-cape-cod/feed/ 0 396702 Forget GDP growth, it’s sustainable wellbeing we need to aim for https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/22/forget-gdp-growth-its-sustainable-wellbeing-we-need-to-aim-for-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/22/forget-gdp-growth-its-sustainable-wellbeing-we-need-to-aim-for-2/#respond Mon, 22 May 2023 11:44:49 +0000 https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/beyond-growth-eu-economy-gdp-sustainable-wellbeing/
This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Robert Costanza.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/22/forget-gdp-growth-its-sustainable-wellbeing-we-need-to-aim-for-2/feed/ 0 396710 Forget GDP growth, it’s sustainable wellbeing we need to aim for https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/22/forget-gdp-growth-its-sustainable-wellbeing-we-need-to-aim-for/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/22/forget-gdp-growth-its-sustainable-wellbeing-we-need-to-aim-for/#respond Mon, 22 May 2023 11:44:49 +0000 https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-growth-eu-economy-gdp-sustainable-wellbeing/
This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Robert Costanza.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/05/22/forget-gdp-growth-its-sustainable-wellbeing-we-need-to-aim-for/feed/ 0 396677 I’ll Never Forget That Smiling Face of Ron DeSantis… As I Was Being Tortured at Guantanamo https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/12/ill-never-forget-that-smiling-face-of-ron-desantis-as-i-was-being-tortured-at-guantanamo/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/12/ill-never-forget-that-smiling-face-of-ron-desantis-as-i-was-being-tortured-at-guantanamo/#respond Wed, 12 Apr 2023 20:27:05 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/ron-desantis-mansoor-adafyi-torture

So many military staffers and guards passed through Guantanamo during my 14-year detention that I remember only the kindest, and the cruellest – the ones who seemed to take joy in our misery.

In 2021, just as my memoir – Don’t Forget Us Here, Lost and Found at Guantanamo – was about to be published, I was on Twitter and saw a photo of a handsome man in a white navy uniform. It was Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. I do not remember what the post was about – probably something about him clashing with President Joe Biden over COVID policies. But I remembered his face. It was a face I could never forget. I had seen that face for the first time in Guantanamo, in 2006 – one of the camp’s darkest years when the authorities started violently breaking hunger strikes and three of my brothers were found dead in their cages.

After finding a Miami Herald article in which DeSantis bragged about his service at Guantanamo and confirming that my memory is correct, I sent his photo to a group chat of former detainees. Several replied that they too remembered his face from Guantanamo. Some said seeing his face again triggered painful memories of the trauma they suffered during their imprisonment. I understood. Even after spending the previous few years working on my memoir, which meant reliving everything I had been through at Guantanamo, seeing his face again triggered a lot of pain in me too.

My advice to Americans: watch out. Do you want as president someone who tries to consolidate his power by creating an environment of fear? Someone who profits from the misery and pain of others?

When I first saw DeSantis, I was on a hunger strike.

In 2005, almost all prisoners in the camp started participating in a hunger strike to protest against torture, inhumane treatment, and being held indefinitely without even being charged with a crime. By 2006, news about our hunger strike was finally getting out. We were feeling hopeful.

One day, as we continued our strike with the hope that change is just around the corner, a naval judge advocate general (JAG), whom I later learned to be DeSantis, walked the blocks with other new arrivals. He stopped and talked to us, explaining that his job was to ensure that the camp was abiding by the Geneva Conventions and that we were being treated humanely.

I remember him asking why we were still on hunger strike. We told him to look around. Camp Delta was constructed from metal shipping containers, divided into cages with wire mesh. In the summer, the cages were like ovens. In the winter, they were cold and wet. They were loud with huge fans and the echoes of all the men’s voices. Then there was the persistent harassment by guards, desecration of Qurans, non-existent medical care, systematic torture, and being completely cut off from the outside world.

We told DeSantis we were on hunger strike because we wanted to know why we were being imprisoned. Because we wanted a fair judicial process to prove our innocence. He took notes. He promised to register our complaints.

A few days later, guards retrieved me from the cage I was in and took me to the recreation yard of the November Block. There, we were greeted by a group of nurses and corpsmen standing next to a metal restraint chair and several cases of liquid nutrient “Ensure”. A group of JAG officers and other observers, including Zak, the camp’s cultural adviser, were watching the scene through the yard’s chain link fence.

I was informed that the US government was determined to break the hunger strike. The doctor in charge, a colonel, told me he did not care if I said I was innocent or protesting mistreatment. He was there for one thing: to make me eat. I refused and was immediately and violently strapped into the chair so tightly that I could not move. A nurse forced a thick tube into my nose and down my throat. My nose bled and the pain was so great that I thought my head would explode. The nurse would not stop. Instead, he began pouring Ensure into a feeder bag attached to the tube.

“Eat!” the nurse yelled. “Eat!”

They poured can after can in the feeder bag until my stomach and throat were so full that Ensure poured back out of my mouth and nose. I thought I was going to drown.

“If you throw up,” a corpsman said, “we’ll start from the beginning with a new case and fill you up again.”

As I tried to break free, I noticed DeSantis’s handsome face among the crowd at the other side of the chain link. He was watching me struggle. He was smiling and laughing with other officers as I screamed in pain.

I threw up in their direction. They jumped back, disgusted. I did not care. I was the only one there who had the right to be disgusted.

That force-feeding was inhumane. It was meant to break me and teach me a lesson. It was meant to show me that I was just an animal with no human rights. There is no other way to call it, it was torture.

Because I had thrown up, they fed me another case. This time, they mixed laxatives into the bag. The mixture of Ensure and laxatives completely wrecked my intestines after having no solid foods for more than nine months. They left me restrained in that chair all night, soiled with my own waste and vomit.

The next day they started again. The message was clear: they were not going to stop force-feeding me like that, torturing me, until I ended my hunger strike.

So, I ended my hunger strike. All but a few of us did. A brother who saw me brought back to my cage said I was as swollen as a dead body found in the water.

Still, we kept protesting, especially against guards desecrating the Quran. We started planning for another hunger strike. In June, three men on my block, Yassir, Mana’a, and Ali, were found hanging in their cages, their hands and feet tied, pieces of cloth shoved down their throats. The camp administration called the deaths “suicides” and “asymmetrical warfare”. No one believed it.

I was eventually sent to solitary confinement, permitted to wear only shorts or a suicide smock – a heavy, disgusting-smelling tube of cloth too thick to roll into a noose. Along with the others in the solitary block, I was regularly pepper-sprayed, beaten during cell searches, and subjected to cavity searches worse than rape.

I wrote about all this in my memoir. I did not mention DeSantis was there, witnessing the torture, because I did not know who he was when I was writing.

As far as I know, DeSantis did not order my hunger strike to be violently broken or wrote the policies that allowed it to happen. He was just a guy who claimed he was there to help us and then just watched while we were being tortured. He did not torture me, but he sure seemed to take joy from it.

Today, the violence my brothers and I endured in 2006, and its connection to DeSantis, are in the news again, not because the Florida governor belatedly decided to do the right thing and talk against it, but because he might run for president in 2024.

In fact, DeSantis still calls Guantanamo a “terrorist detention facility”, even though back in 2006, the year he was there, an analysis of official documents found that the great majority of the Guantanamo prisoners were innocent men, imprisoned only because of mistaken identity or because they had been sold to the US for bounty money. Regardless of these facts, DeSantis advocated keeping Guantanamo open in his 2016 testimony before the Subcommittee on National Security, in which he claimed that all detainees were “hardened and unrepentant terrorist[s]”, whose release “risks harming America’s national security”.

At the time of DeSantis’s speech, 80 prisoners remained at Guantanamo. I was one of them. Of the 779 men held at Guantanamo since it opened in 2002, only 12 have been charged with crimes. Only two have been convicted. I wonder who DeSantis was talking about. He was there. He saw who we were.

I was born in Yemen. In my culture, a man is only as good as his word. DeSantis is clearly bending the truth to fit his preferred narrative. Maybe he is not a man worthy of leading Florida, let alone the United States.

My advice to Americans: watch out. Do you want as president someone who tries to consolidate his power by creating an environment of fear? Someone who profits from the misery and pain of others? Someone who does not hesitate to bend to truth to further his political goals?

Americans beware of DeSantis, and what belies his handsome smile.


This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Mansoor Adayfi.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/04/12/ill-never-forget-that-smiling-face-of-ron-desantis-as-i-was-being-tortured-at-guantanamo/feed/ 0 387223 Let’s Not Forget the Pre-Invasion War Against Iraq https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/28/lets-not-forget-the-pre-invasion-war-against-iraq/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/28/lets-not-forget-the-pre-invasion-war-against-iraq/#respond Tue, 28 Mar 2023 05:14:17 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=277807

The mainstream press and the Internet are filled with commentators who are expressing deep regret and remorse for having supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. That’s a good sign. But we shouldn’t forget that the U.S. government was waging war against the Iraqi people for ten years prior to its deadly and destructive invasion and war of aggression in 2003.

I’m referring to the U.S. government’s system of economic sanctions against the Iraqi people from the time of the Persian Gulf War in 1990-91 through the 2003 invasion. The purpose of those sanctions was to inflict massive death and economic impoverishment on the Iraqi people. The idea was that if Iraqi citizens could be made to suffer in a big way, they would do the dirty work of ousting their dictator Saddam Hussein and replacing him with a pro-U.S. dictator. 

The sanctions succeeded in their immediate goal of killing and impoverishing Iraqis. During the Persian Gulf War, the Pentagon destroyed Iraq’s water-and-sewage treatment plants, knowing that this would help spread infectious illnesses among the populace. The Pentagon’s plan succeeded magnificently. The next ten years of sanctions prevented Iraqi officials from repairing those water-and-sewage treatment plants. Thousands of Iraqi children were dying on a monthly basis.

In 1996, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeline Albright was asked whether the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children from the sanctions was worth it. She replied that the deaths were, in fact, “worth it.” By “it” she was referring to regime change. She was expressing the view of the U.S. government and many U.S. interventionists, who were convinced that the increasing death toll would motivate Saddam to leave power or motivate the Iraqi people to initiate a violent revolution that would have produced even more deaths. The sanctions continued for another seven years.

At the same time, the sanctions threw Iraq into an extreme downward economic spiral. The poor were doing everything just to survive. The middle class and the wealthy were selling valued family possessions and heirlooms just to eke out a living. 

While the sanctions succeeded in their intermediate goal of killing and impoverishing the Iraqi people, they failed to secure the ouster of Saddam Hussein from power. That was why U.S. officials decided to use the 9/11 attacks and the fake WMD rationale as the excuse for invading Iraq in 2003. They knew that their deadly and destructive sanctions had failed to secure regime change and were unlikely to do so in the future. 

It is worth noting — as an additional matter of moral perversity — that U.S. officials had partnered with Saddam Hussein during the 1980s in his war of aggression against Iran. Yes, the dictator they would come to call the “new Hitler” in 2003 was their partner and ally when he was killing Iranians in the 1980s.

Why were U.S. officials helping Saddam to kill Iranians? In 1953, a CIA coup removed the democratically elected Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh from power and replaced him with the brutal, CIA-trained tyranny of the Shah of Iran. In 1979, the Iranian people revolted against the Shah’s brutal tyranny and ousted him from power. The Pentagon, the CIA, and other U.S. officials hated them for doing that. That’s why they were helping the “new Hitler” to kill Iranians in the 1980s.

While we are on the subject of moral perversity, it’s also worth pointing out why U.S. officials were so certain that they would “find” WMDs when they invaded Iraq in 2003. That’s because they knew that the U.S. had furnished its “new Hitler” with those WMDs in the 1980s so that he could use them to kill Iranians. They figured that they would find some of those WMDs when they invaded and be able to exclaim, “We have saved the world from Saddam’s WMDs with our invasion!” But their “new Hitler” had foiled them by destroying those WMDs long before their 2003 invasion. See my compilation of articles in “Where Did Iraqi Get Its Weapons of Mass Destruction?” (Some links in the compilation are no longer operative.)

Wouldn’t it be nice to see all the regretters of the 2003 U.S. invasion and war of aggression against Iraq expressing regret and remorse for everything the U.S. government has done to kill and destroy the Iraqi people? 

This originally appeared on Jacob Hornberger’s Expand Freedom blog.


This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jacob Hornberger.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/28/lets-not-forget-the-pre-invasion-war-against-iraq/feed/ 0 382563 The Illegal Invasion of Iraq: Never Forget https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/18/the-illegal-invasion-of-iraq-never-forget/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/18/the-illegal-invasion-of-iraq-never-forget/#respond Sat, 18 Mar 2023 10:40:01 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/illegal-invasion-of-iraq-never-forget

How did we get here? 20 years after the U.S.-led invasion of the sovereign nation of Iraq, we still refuse to reckon with the last decades of war as yet another decade of violence unfolds. Since the invasion, tens of thousands if not over a million lives have been lost. Millions of Iraqis are still displaced, while tens of millions have endured relentless violence ever since the destabilization of their country beginning in the 1990s through bombing, sanctions, multiple military invasions, and the occupation that began in 2003.

We share these reflections as two antimilitarist organizers in the U.S. who met years after the invasion through our shared work with About Face Veterans Against War (formerly known as Iraq Veterans Against the War). Twenty years ago this weekend, one of us was deployed as a communications technician and heard nothing about the massive protests the other participated in. One of us was organizing with Direct Action to Stop the War, coordinating twenty thousand people to shut down San Francisco's financial district, in an attempt to raise the financial and social cost of invasion that was being steamrolled through despite the largest global street protests in the history of the world.

We know the war on Iraq—like the war on Afghanistan—was a calculated grift for money and power. We can't allow the truth to be manipulated or forgotten. George W. Bush is being reanimated as a folksy painter instead of brought to account for his administration's war crimes. His creation of the so-called "Endless Wars" after 9/11 has so far cost incalculable damage to peoples' lives and over $14 trillion in Pentagon spending. Up to half of that massive amount has piped directly into the pockets of private military contractors.

Those who seek profit from wars rely on our consent, our confusion about what's really happening, and our willingness to submit to historical amnesia. The only voices allowed to speak on large platforms about this 20-year milestone are the ones attempting to rewrite history in favor of the architects and beneficiaries of war. A former speechwriter for Bush wants you to buy that the U.S. "went to war to build a democracy in Iraq," but listen instead to Iraqis like Riverbend (the pen name of a young Baghdadi woman writing during the early years of the occupation) who told us the truth at the time:

"You lost the day your tanks rolled into Baghdad to the cheers of your imported, American-trained monkeys. You lost every single family whose home your soldiers violated. You lost every sane, red-blooded Iraqi when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out and verified your atrocities behind prison walls as well as the ones we see in our streets. You lost when you brought murderers, looters, gangsters and militia heads to power and hailed them as Iraq's first democratic government. You lost when a gruesome execution was dubbed your biggest accomplishment. You lost the respect and reputation you once had. You lost more than 3000 troops. That is what you lost America. I hope the oil, at least, made it worthwhile."

Even now in Iraq, everyday people still struggle daily for the bare minimum. As the nonpartisan Iraqi diaspora group Collective Action for Iraq recently described, "People have continued taking to the streets across Iraq to protest corruption, for basic services and to live their lives in dignity—from Kurdistan, to Najaf, and Dhi Qar. State and local security forces continue to respond with violence and the suppression of dissident voices." These are only a few effects of the cascade of violence triggered by the U.S. occupation.

The silence here about the devastation caused by U.S. wars abroad is by design. Obama came to office on a platform of "change" nodding strongly towards the populist antiwar sentiment of the late 2000s, and yet here we are, still prioritizing war. Under this ongoing "Global War on Terror" framework—under Bush and Obama and Trump and now Biden—the lead-up to each consecutive war utilizes tailored rhetoric but the patterns remain the same, even while weapons evolve. Now the contractors are the same corporations providing the software we use every day. Google and Microsoft work alongside Raytheon and Northrop Grumman to produce and operate weapons of mass destruction. The war machine is becoming more secretive, more connected, and more ubiquitous. None of us can afford to remain silent or apathetic about the devastation we continue to cause to innocent civilians. The money being spent on war must be redirected to those most impacted by U.S. aggression.

Instead of reparations to Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. has stolen billions from the Afghan Central Bank; drained Iraq of people, its resources, and undermined civil society creating regional instability. If we allow ourselves to be lied to yet again about these wars, we are more easily manipulated to go along with the next iteration of the U.S. war. Obama's so-called "Pacific Pivot" initiated a shift back to China, yet again, as the leading rationale for continued military buildup. The fear-mongering is the same, yet the tactics of war-making are being implemented with evermore secrecy by intelligence officials and contractors preventing public discourse and effective oversight.

Our misleadingly named "defense" spending, the money earmarked for expanding U.S. control overseas, has doubled since the invasion of Iraq. Nothing stops the growth of war profiteering: not exposures of war crimes, not the inarguable destabilization of multiple countries with increased violence and displacement, not the epidemics of veteran suicide and war trauma coming home, not the avoidance of auditing or accountability for the use of such funds. Last Monday, Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord told reporters that a $1 trillion defense budget is coming soon.

What will the world look like 20 years from today? If this country cannot relinquish its death grip on empire-building, we will have only continued to impoverish and incarcerate our own population while spreading unimaginable destruction abroad. The U.S. military is also the biggest polluter on the planet; in order to address the dangers of climate change, we must shrink this footprint immediately.

If we want a brighter future, we can and must divest from wars abroad and the increased domestic militarization that both pose serious threats to democracy. We can move that money from the Pentagon, police, and prisons to invest instead in community needs and real safety. We can pursue diplomacy, nonviolent interventions, and repair. This country is rich in leadership—especially in Black, Brown, and Indigenous-led grassroots community organizing. There are those working toward taking better care of each other amid conditions created by an overextended empire that deprioritizes human needs. Let's move towards collective healing instead of continually funneling money into the bloody pockets of CEOs of weapons makers and major corporations that profit off death and destruction. Let's return resources, including money and sovereignty, to the people most impacted by these wars.


This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Clare Bayard.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/18/the-illegal-invasion-of-iraq-never-forget/feed/ 0 380416 We Can’t Forget Jimmy Carter’s Disastrous Legacy in Afghanistan https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/15/we-cant-forget-jimmy-carters-disastrous-legacy-in-afghanistan/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/15/we-cant-forget-jimmy-carters-disastrous-legacy-in-afghanistan/#respond Wed, 15 Mar 2023 18:50:22 +0000 https://progressive.org/op-eds/we-cant-forget-jimmy-carters-legacy-afghanistan-230315/
This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Glenn Sacks.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/15/we-cant-forget-jimmy-carters-disastrous-legacy-in-afghanistan/feed/ 0 379639 Indict Trump? Sure, But Don’t Forget That’s Exactly What He Wants https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/13/indict-trump-sure-but-dont-forget-thats-exactly-what-he-wants/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/13/indict-trump-sure-but-dont-forget-thats-exactly-what-he-wants/#respond Mon, 13 Mar 2023 05:23:49 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=276633 Former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson tells USA Today that former president Donald Trump should abandon his 2024 campaign to re-take the White House if he’s indicted: “It doesn’t mean that he’s guilty of it or he should be charged, but it’s just such a distraction that would be unnecessary for somebody who’s seeking the highest office More

The post Indict Trump? Sure, But Don’t Forget That’s Exactly What He Wants appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thomas Knapp.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/13/indict-trump-sure-but-dont-forget-thats-exactly-what-he-wants/feed/ 0 378977 Twelve Years and We Must Never Forget the Ongoing Horror of the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/10/twelve-years-and-we-must-never-forget-the-ongoing-horror-of-the-fukushima-nuclear-disaster/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/10/twelve-years-and-we-must-never-forget-the-ongoing-horror-of-the-fukushima-nuclear-disaster/#respond Fri, 10 Mar 2023 13:07:27 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/fukushima-nuclear-power-climate

Tomorrow—March 11, 2023—twelve years will have passed since the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima-Daiichi reactor complex, a meltdown due to a massive, but not surprising, tsunami. Not surprising due to Japan's location in what is known to geologists as "the ring of fire," a powerful designation of the area around the Pacific Ocean where seismic activity is endemic. The Pacific shoreline of Japan is a very poor spot to build numerous nuclear reactors for that very reason.

And yet, after closing all reactors in response to Fukushima, the government has reopened some shuttered nukes, and plans to open still more. In spite of all the seismic risks, the huge radiation exposure from the initial Fukushima meltdown, and in spite of the terrible nuclear toll the country paid due to the US bombing at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The government says they want to stop using gas and oil from Russia. If the Japanese government wants to do this, renewables are getting more affordable, better at their jobs, and more vital to the health of the flora and fauna on earth every day- and in fact, Japan has a huge, untouched capacity for offshore wind.

In the initial meltdown caused by lack of coolant and electricity during the tsunami in 2011, reactor cores—the part of the plant that actually houses the power production—released large plumes of radioactivity into the air. The area was evacuated, and some citizens have never returned home. The only way to prevent a release of toxic elements from the destroyed reactor cores is a constant coolant bath. Water is dumped onto the cores, becomes highly radioactive, and then must be isolated from the world. This has resulted in the huge water problem that exists today.

Radioactive water is the main waste issue right now. There is so much of it in tanks covering every square inch of the reactor site. The water is partially filtered by a system with the acronym ALPS. It is designed to remove the most toxic elements from the water: strontium, cesium, plutonium, and more. These most toxic products of nuclear reaction are currently accumulating in the form of truly horrific sludge. And still, nobody is suggesting a permanent solution.

In addition, the system was not designed to remove heavy water, known as tritium, and also leaves small amounts of radionucleides in the water. TEPCO, the company that owns the reactors, and the Japanese government are trying to convince the world that tritium-laced water is just fine and that millions and millions of gallons of tritiated water being dumped into the Pacific Ocean would be no problem.

Tritium is a form of water with an extra hydrogen atom—the dangers are very much in dispute. The nuclear industry and the Japanese government want to project a completely safe image of this radioactive element that is almost never found in nature. However, there are scientists who have linked high exposure to tritium to cancer risks.

The victims of the United States open-air nuclear testing—the islands in the Pacific such as the Marshall Islands from 1946-1958—are not pleased about the tritium-laced water that will be contaminating their fishing grounds if this huge, multi-year release is allowed to happen. The radioactive load from the testing is still so great that some of these islands have never been reinhabited. South Korea, North Korea, and China have expressed concern. Japanese fishers from the area around Fukushima have pleaded with the government to store this stuff, and not dump it into the Pacific, but Japan seems determined to dispose of this contaminated water. They are exclusively using the word "treated," not radioactive, for the water.

At a time when the United States is again throwing huge sums of money at the nuclear industry—to the tune of $6 billion to rehabilitate old reactors, many of which are the same model as those that failed so badly in Japan—we need to remember that the timeline for decommissioning Fukushima—stopping the nuclear chain reaction in the damaged reactor cores—remains 30-40 years, as it was the year after the meltdowns. This sounds an awful lot like: we don't know what the hell we can do to stop this.

The nuclear industry has posited itself as an answer to climate change. And it is true that nuclear power is not coal. Those who prefer corporate control of our energy system, instead of the small-scale wind, solar, and other alternatives that we can install and use to generate our home power, will continue to promote nukes.

When we are in a time of political instability, when threats to reactors like we have witnessed in Ukraine are very real, it is time to decommission and isolate the reactors and the poisons that have already been created. If there is a system collapse, who will maintain the nuclear reactors around the world?

Please, anyone who believes that nuclear is the answer to climate destruction, think of Fukushima.


This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Nancy Braus.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/10/twelve-years-and-we-must-never-forget-the-ongoing-horror-of-the-fukushima-nuclear-disaster/feed/ 0 378490 Rob Campbell: Public service bosses of ‘Pyongponeke’ forget who they’re supposed to serve https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/06/rob-campbell-public-service-bosses-of-pyongponeke-forget-who-theyre-supposed-to-serve/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/06/rob-campbell-public-service-bosses-of-pyongponeke-forget-who-theyre-supposed-to-serve/#respond Mon, 06 Mar 2023 06:00:45 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=85816 COMMENTARY: By Rob Campbell

In Pyongyang there is a public service which would appeal to our own Public Service Commissioner in Aotearoa New Zealand. It never makes any dissenting or controversial view known.

Rather it readies itself for any potential change in the face of the Kim family leadership. Ever ready to resume the daily grind of boot-licking and box-ticking of a docile public service.

It is, as I like to say, neutered rather than neutral, but from above it can be very hard to tell the difference.

In the ideal world that seems to be preferred in “PyongPoneke”, there is no room for open debate and each word means what the Public Service Commissioner says it means.

It is rather like the world described by Lewis Carroll: “When I use a word”, Humpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all”. Thank you Commissioner Humpty for your work taking the word “impartiality” out of the dictionary and into the public service world.

Imperial and colonial past
I am not against the public service. I am strongly for an excellent, efficient, equitable and effective public service. But you do not get that in a modern and complex society from a model of public service derived from a monocultural, inequitable and dare I say it (yes I do) imperial and colonial past.

In the real world what they like to call our public service is in fact a politically subservient service, far removed from the public it is supposed to serve.

This comment is not directed at the many thousands of public servants working closely with those they serve.

These people, the real public service, are often underpaid and overworked. They spend much time battling with the rules and processes and prejudices imposed on them by those at the top of the tree. Many are scared to speak up, so they leave or stay quiet.

I understand why, they need the job too much to risk being branded difficult. Not a few of them write to me, call me, or stop me in the street. And it is not to say “get back in line”.

They and the mandarins themselves know what the problem is. There is a square mile or so around the Beehive in Wellington, which is like the Vatican in Italy. A different country within a country. The world looks totally different from there.

Those there are mainly there for the same reason, and they are faced inwards, mentally at least, towards what they see as power and away from the people, the public they are supposed to serve.

They cannot understand Ōtara, or Cannons Creek . . .
They cannot see, hear or understand those in Ōtara, in Te Tai Tokerau, in Tairāwhiti, in Cannons Creek, on the West Coast or rural Southland.

Alongside the big consultancy firms that share their buildings, their CVs and their views, senior advisers draw up plans for the rest of us on whiteboards.

These are parsed by the “tier one” people who over coffee, wine, or whisky cosily massage these into an acceptable form for politicians. Just enough choices to create an illusion of political control, but not so much as to upset the system.

Are these people impartial or neutral ? No, they do not need to be. They have strong views which reflect the caste they belong to. Some of them even jokingly refer to this as “Poneketanga”.

They engage rafts of “communications” people to sell the story — often poorly as in Te Whatu Ora, where there are more than 200 such people and where despite that overload PR firms are often called in to sell better.

Back to basics
This is not a way to create an efficient, effective, excellent and equitable public service. To do that we will have to go back to some basics about the purpose of public service today and in the future.

To my mind this would include:

  • Opening up jobs to a much wider range of people with real world experience, be that commercial or social, in forms that are not all for a lifetime, but which enable free and ongoing interchange;
  • Opening up policy-making to start from the “bottom up”, and which are not based on “top down”, carefully framed, bogus consultations;
  • Allowing people to speak their minds and debate difficult issues without having to assume that future political winners are not so prejudiced and narrow-minded as to refuse to work with anyone with a different opinion to theirs; and
  • Paying real attention, not playing pretend attention, to the professional bodies and unions which represent staff, who mostly will prefer rightly to get on with their jobs.

None of that seems hard or dangerous to me. After all, it is only changing a public service model which has produced or failed to prevent all of the many crises we can observe around us.

Rob Campbell is former chairperson of Te Whatu Ora (Health New Zealand) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This article was first published by Stuff and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.


This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/03/06/rob-campbell-public-service-bosses-of-pyongponeke-forget-who-theyre-supposed-to-serve/feed/ 0 377293 “Never Forget Our People Were Always Free”: Civil Rights Leader Ben Jealous on His New Memoir https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/10/never-forget-our-people-were-always-free-civil-rights-leader-ben-jealous-on-his-new-memoir/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/10/never-forget-our-people-were-always-free-civil-rights-leader-ben-jealous-on-his-new-memoir/#respond Tue, 10 Jan 2023 15:32:37 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=0d1f75c1fd79862b3856d578d1ad690a
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/10/never-forget-our-people-were-always-free-civil-rights-leader-ben-jealous-on-his-new-memoir/feed/ 0 363441 “Never Forget Our People Were Always Free”: Civil Rights Leader Ben Jealous on His New Memoir https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/10/never-forget-our-people-were-always-free-civil-rights-leader-ben-jealous-on-his-new-memoir-2/ https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/10/never-forget-our-people-were-always-free-civil-rights-leader-ben-jealous-on-his-new-memoir-2/#respond Tue, 10 Jan 2023 13:47:32 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=678f4f7c62e1d26becbf520b57a5cc2d Seg3 ben

We speak with civil rights leader Ben Jealous about his new memoir, “Never Forget Our People Were Always Free,” which examines his long career as an activist and organizer, and growing up the son of a white father and a Black mother. He discusses the lessons he drew from his mother, Ann Todd Jealous, and his grandmother, Mamie Todd, about the racism they experienced in their lifetimes. Jealous has led the NAACP and the progressive advocacy group People for the American Way, and is set to be the next executive director of the Sierra Club.


This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/10/never-forget-our-people-were-always-free-civil-rights-leader-ben-jealous-on-his-new-memoir-2/feed/ 0 363447 Why Africans Will "Never Forget" U.S. History of Coups & Support for Dictators https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/13/why-africans-will-never-forget-u-s-history-of-coups-support-for-dictators/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/13/why-africans-will-never-forget-u-s-history-of-coups-support-for-dictators/#respond Tue, 13 Dec 2022 23:07:09 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=efd48172a84c657676834a289e5cc24d
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/13/why-africans-will-never-forget-u-s-history-of-coups-support-for-dictators/feed/ 0 357453 We Must Not Forget the War in Afghanistan https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/13/we-must-not-forget-the-war-in-afghanistan/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/13/we-must-not-forget-the-war-in-afghanistan/#respond Tue, 13 Dec 2022 06:43:59 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=268208

When the Pentagon used NATO to provoke Russia  into invading Ukraine, it had to know that one of the great benefits to such an invasion would be that it would enrich U.S. weapons manufacturers, who, of course, are an important, integral, and loyal part of America’s national-security state form of governmental structure. 

And sure enough, those weapons manufacturers now have a lot to be grateful for. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, 

The world’s biggest arms makers are scaling up production of rocket launchers, tanks and ammunition as the industry shifts to meet what executives expect to be sustained demand triggered by the war in Ukraine.

The Pentagon has committed more than $17 billion in weapons and services to Ukraine, most of it drawn from existing stocks. It has also awarded about $3.4 billion in new contracts to replenish domestic and allies’ stocks.

The Pentagon knew that when it was forced to exit Afghanistan, where it had used a massive amount of weaponry for some twenty years to wreak death and destruction on that impoverished Third World country, its loyal army of arms manufacturers might begin to suffer. The crisis that the Pentagon has ginned up in Ukraine has clearly helped to alleviate that suffering. 

But the Russian invasion of Ukraine had had another beneficiary — the Pentagon itself. That’s because before Americans had a real opportunity to focus on the Pentagon’s 20-year deadly and destructive debacle in Afghanistan, everyone began focusing exclusively on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Thanks to the crisis in Ukraine, the entire Afghanistan misadventure has been relegated to a memory black hole.

But we really still need to do some serious soul-searching, examination, and analysis of the Afghanistan debacle. We cannot let the Pentagon use the crisis that it has ginned up in Ukraine as a way to shift our attention away from what happened in Afghanistan. It would be a grave mistake to just “move on” from Afghanistan and permit the Pentagon to focus our attention exclusively on the evil Russians and their invasion of Ukraine.

It is important to focus on the Constitution, the document that President Biden and the Democrats and even some Republicans have suddenly discovered and begun revering. It requires a congressional declaration of war before a president can legally wage war. There was never a congressional declaration of war against Afghanistan. That made the Pentagon’s war against Afghanistan an illegal one under our form of constitutional government.

Equally important, if President George W. Bush had sought a declaration of war from Congress, it is a virtual certainty that he would not have been able to secure it. That’s because Bush would not have been able to provide any evidence whatsoever of Taliban complicity in the 9/11 attacks. Without any evidence of such complicity, it is difficult to imagine Congress issuing a declaration of war against Afghanistan, especially knowing that such a war would inevitably wreak massive death and destruction on that impoverished Third World country.

Bush claimed that his invasion of Afghanistan was morally justified under the principle of “self-defense.” But that claim necessarily depended on showing that the Taliban regime was involved in the 9/11 attacks. No such evidence existed, and Bush knew it. Thus, if he had gone to Congress and sought a declaration of war based on “self-defense,” he would have gone there empty-handed insofar as evidence is concerned.

In fact, if Bush really believed that the Taliban regime had attacked the United States, he would never have gone to the United Nations seeking its approval to defend itself by invading Afghanistan. No president would do that. 

What about the “harboring” charge? Bush claimed that his invasion of Afghanistan was morally justified because Afghanistan was “harboring” Osama bin Laden. Bush’s claim is without validity. To warrant a “harboring” charge, Bush would have to provide evidence that the Taliban regime had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks and was knowingly conspiring with bin Laden to provide him a base to plan the attacks. Bush knew that he had no evidence to support such a charge.

What Bush actually meant by his “harboring” charge was that the Taliban was refusing to comply with Bush’s unconditional extradition demand for bin Laden. But under international law, the Taliban regime had every right to refuse Bush’s extradition demand. That’s because there was no extradition treaty between Afghanistan and the United States. When there is no extradition treaty between two nations, neither one is required to comply with an extradition demand from the other.

What about the claim that the 9/11 attacks were an “act of war” and, therefore, the United States had the legitimate authority to invade Afghanistan to kill or capture bin Laden, who was living in Afghanistan?

It was a bogus justification for invading Afghanistan. Under U.S. law, terrorism is a criminal offense, not an act of war. That’s why terrorism prosecutions are brought in U.S. District Courts. No nation has the legitimate authority to invade another nation to kill or capture a suspected criminal who is residing in that country.

One of the most notorious terrorists was a CIA man named Jose Posada Carriles. He is widely considered to be one of the people who brought down a Cuban airline with a bomb over Venezuelan skies. He later safely ensconced himself in the United States.

When Venezuela demanded Posada’s extradition, U.S. officials protected him by refusing to comply, notwithstanding the fact that there was an extradition treaty between Venezuela and the United States.

Would interventionists who supported the deadly and destructive  invasion of Afghanistan to kill or capture bin Laden have supported a similar deadly and destructive  Venezuelan invasion of the United States to kill or capture Posada? I think not.

Using NATO to gin up the crisis in Ukraine is bad enough. While U.S. arms manufacturers are clearly a beneficiary of that crisis, so is the Pentagon because it has caused people to forget what the Pentagon did to the people of Afghanistan and to just “move” on to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We must not let that happen, especially given the massive death and destruction that the Pentagon wreaked in its immoral and illegal war against an impoverished Third World country.

This first appeared on Hornberger’s Expand Freedom blog.


This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Jacob Hornberger.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/13/we-must-not-forget-the-war-in-afghanistan/feed/ 0 357231 Forget Moral Arguments. A Loss and Damage Fund Is a Win for Americans https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/09/forget-moral-arguments-a-loss-and-damage-fund-is-a-win-for-americans/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/09/forget-moral-arguments-a-loss-and-damage-fund-is-a-win-for-americans/#respond Fri, 09 Dec 2022 06:49:33 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=267972 American political commentators wasted no time falsely equating the creation of a loss and damage fund at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) with “climate reparations” and fringe globalist conspiracies. With every news story about the fund presenting as solely a moral issue, I’m hardly surprised to see that reaction. “Loss and damage” refers More

The post Forget Moral Arguments. A Loss and Damage Fund Is a Win for Americans appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ethan Brown.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/12/09/forget-moral-arguments-a-loss-and-damage-fund-is-a-win-for-americans/feed/ 0 356521 Don’t Forget White Rage https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/23/dont-forget-white-rage/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/23/dont-forget-white-rage/#respond Wed, 23 Nov 2022 06:51:44 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=266160 Mainstream “liberal” and “progressive” media pundits seem overjoyed with the outcome of the recent 2020 elections. Commentators at The New York Times and MSNBC, among many others, seemed to have breathed a sigh of relief that the Democrats held onto the Senate and gave little ground in the House, losing far fewer seats than the More

The post Don’t Forget White Rage appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Rosen.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/23/dont-forget-white-rage/feed/ 0 352903 With NZ’s Three Waters reforms under fire, let’s not forget that safe and affordable water is a human right https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/03/with-nzs-three-waters-reforms-under-fire-lets-not-forget-that-safe-and-affordable-water-is-a-human-right/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/03/with-nzs-three-waters-reforms-under-fire-lets-not-forget-that-safe-and-affordable-water-is-a-human-right/#respond Thu, 03 Nov 2022 00:28:24 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=80750 ANALYSIS: By Nathan Cooper, University of Waikato

While ostensibly about improving Aotearoa New Zealand’s water infrastructure, the government’s proposed Three Waters reforms have instead become a lightning rod for political division and distrust.

Critics cite concerns about local democracy, de facto privatisation and co-governance with Māori as reasons to oppose the Water Services Entities Bill currently before Parliament.

With the mayors of Auckland and Christchurch now proposing an alternative plan, the reforms may be far from a done deal.

But behind the debate lies an undeniable truth: clean water is a necessity of life. In fact, 20 years ago this month the United Nations Committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights first affirmed that water is a human right.

The anniversary is a timely reminder of what Aotearoa’s proposed water reforms are essentially about.

Covering drinking water, wastewater and stormwater (hence the “three waters” label), the reforms would have a wider remit than the human right to water. They fold in environmental and cultural considerations alongside public health concerns.

But the human right to water, as well as lessons learned from implementing that right, have important implications for the Three Waters debate, not least around water quality and affordability.

A fragile right
By acknowledging it to be a human right in 2002, the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights argued water is indispensable for leading a dignified life and essential for other human rights.

Since then, the human right to water has been repeatedly declared, including by the UN General Assembly and the European Union. This right is included in the constitutions and laws of numerous countries.

Despite this, 1 billion people still lack access to safe drinking water, and six out of ten people live with inadequate sanitation. More than 2 billion people live in areas of water scarcity, likely to become an even bigger issue due to climate change.

The human right to water covers five essential factors:

  • access to enough water for drinking, personal sanitation, washing clothes, preparing food, personal and household hygiene
  • water that is clean and won’t cause harm
  • the look and smell of water should be acceptable
  • water sources should be within easy reach and accessible without danger
  • the cost should be low enough to ensure everyone can buy enough water to meet their needs.
Voices for Freedom protest
The anti-government protest movement Voices for Freedom has added Three Waters to its list of grievances. Image: Getty Images/The Conversation

Access and affordability
Internationally, there is evidence that the adoption of a human right to water has made a difference. In South Africa, where access to sufficient water is a constitutional right, the courts have repeatedly referred to the human right to water when determining government obligations around water services.

In 2014, the first European Citizens’ Initiative pushed the European Union to exclude water supply and water resources management from the rules governing the European internal market. This means EU citizens have a stronger voice in water governance decisions.

In 2016, Slovenia became the first EU country to make access to drinkable water a fundamental right in its constitution.

New Zealand’s Three Waters reforms are not unrelated to these basic issues of safety, accessibility and affordability. They aim to address significant problems with the country’s existing water services model, including ageing infrastructure, historical under-investment, the need for climate change resilience, and rising consumer demand.

These all require a serious programme of water service transformation — one the government believes is beyond what local councils (which currently administer most water assets) will be able to deliver.

The projected cost is estimated at between NZ$120 billion and $185 billion (on top of currently planned investment), rolled out over the next 30 years.

Ambition and equity
One way or another, the work has to be done. Last year elevated lead levels were found in the water in east Otago. Ageing infrastructure and increasing demand are likely to increase the risk of similar incidents unless expensive upgrades are undertaken.

Without reform, the government argues, the huge cost of those upgrades will be unevenly spread across households, with a substantially higher burden on rural consumers.

To be affordable and equitable for everyone, therefore, the Three Waters plan involves creating four publicly owned, multi-regional entities. These will benefit from greater scale, expertise, operational efficiencies and financial flexibility compared to local councils.

But because councils could still contract out water services for 35 years, concerns have been raised about the potential for creeping privatisation.

Indeed, similar concerns, including failed attempts to privatise water services in other countries, were a significant catalyst for asserting the human right to water more than two decades ago.

While international acknowledgment of water as a human right doesn’t automatically create binding obligations on New Zealand’s government, it can still inform the Three Waters debate.

Over the past 20 years, many of the benefits of this right have accrued from its ability to focus attention on securing high-quality and sustainable water services for everyone. That remains an essential ambition for New Zealand in 2022 and beyond.The Conversation

Dr Nathan Cooper is associate professor of law, University of Waikato. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.


This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/11/03/with-nzs-three-waters-reforms-under-fire-lets-not-forget-that-safe-and-affordable-water-is-a-human-right/feed/ 0 347525 Nobody Will Forget How Hot It Is When It Comes Time To Vote https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/08/nobody-will-forget-how-hot-it-is-when-it-comes-time-to-vote/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/08/nobody-will-forget-how-hot-it-is-when-it-comes-time-to-vote/#respond Thu, 08 Sep 2022 16:43:56 +0000 https://www.commondreams.org/node/339580
This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Sara Guillermo.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/09/08/nobody-will-forget-how-hot-it-is-when-it-comes-time-to-vote/feed/ 0 331110 ‘Don’t forget our past – write about us,’ says Vanuatu founding father https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/30/dont-forget-our-past-write-about-us-says-vanuatu-founding-father/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/30/dont-forget-our-past-write-about-us-says-vanuatu-founding-father/#respond Tue, 30 Aug 2022 08:31:41 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=78587 By Agnes Herbert in Port Vila

A founding father and former politician has urged young journalists to write more about Vanuatu’s history.

In a presentation to trainee journalists, Pastor Sethy John Regenvanu called on future writers to write more about people who have contributed to Vanuatu’s history and record their stories.

“I am one of the few leaders who is still around and we are sort of a rare commodity,’’ he said.

“I’m not going to be speaking to people all the time.

“You may say that you cannot find important books that pertain to us, then you have to ask why.

“I want you people to feel able to come and interview us who have lived in different stages of the country’s evolution and have had the experience of leading this country into independence — and interview us and write books about us.’’

The 78-year-old author elaborated on the writings that are important for people to read. He said they included significant stories that tell people about the happenings of Vanuatu.

His autobiography Laef Blong Mi
He opened his presentation by displaying some of his own published works, which included his autobiography Laef Blong Mi, written in 2004.

Pointing to his autobiography, he said not many writers had written about important people in Vanuatu’s history.

“Not many of us have got a life story — like I have here,’’ he said.

“It means that writers haven’t done important life experience stories which are a very important part of this history. They are the identity of this nation.’’

The retired leader said he believed stories or information were best relayed when written.

“What you hear through word of mouth, or other mediums, faces the potential risk of distortion, exaggeration, third parties — and in due course becomes untrustworthy, unreliable and forgotten,” he said.

Pastor Regenvanu encouraged future journalists to always be truthful reporters and have the credibility to help others.

He said it was important to be “inquisitive” and to “take life seriously” as the media could have both positive and negative impacts.

Republished from the Vanuatu Daily Post with permission.


This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/30/dont-forget-our-past-write-about-us-says-vanuatu-founding-father/feed/ 0 327604 Forget Alex Jones—Look at His Helpers https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/18/forget-alex-jones-look-at-his-helpers/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/18/forget-alex-jones-look-at-his-helpers/#respond Thu, 18 Aug 2022 17:53:15 +0000 https://fair.org/?p=9029901 People have affixed themselves to Alex Jones, likely motivated by a calculus that his controversy can move their careers forward.

The post Forget Alex Jones—Look at His Helpers appeared first on FAIR.

]]>  

Alex's War

Poster for Alex’s War, Alex Lee Moyer’s documentary about Alex Jones.

There are two publicly available displays making headlines right now about Infowars host Alex Jones, America’s best-known conspiracy monger.

One is the Alex Lee Moyer documentary Alex’s War, a one-sided portrayal so friendly Jones himself is eager to promote it. Variety (7/30/22) noted that it offers no “mediating voices,” and “never overtly takes Jones to task.” It doesn’t “show you a thing about his personal life, or anything about his business of using politics to sell health supplements.” It is “so free of judgment,” the review concludes, “an Alex Jones fan could probably watch it and think, ‘He slays!’”

Dan Friesen, co-host of the Infowars-dissecting Knowledge Fight podcast, told Slate (8/3/22) that Alex’s War was “an almost comatose approach to making a film.” He summed it up:

There’s a person who’s lying—Alex Jones—who’s the main subject of the documentary. And he’s the only source of information about himself, and he’s lying. And the film gives you no reason to suspect that he’s lying.

The film’s faint attempts to provide any critical balance to Jones’ statements, Friesen said, were “not meaningful at all”: “flashes of out-of-context headlines you can’t read, and then the clip of Obama joking about Alex saying he smelled like sulfur.”

Cathartic and illuminating

NYT: Alex Jones, Under Questioning, Is Confronted With Evidence of Deception

New York Times (8/3/22): “Infowars falsely linked the judge to pedophilia and human trafficking; in another, Mr. Jones questioned the intelligence of the jurors in the case, implying that his political enemies had handpicked ‘blue-collar’ people who ‘don’t know what planet they’re on.'”

The other, more balanced and revelatory showcase is the Texas trial related to Jones’ lies about the Sandy Hook school shooting. His false claims that the massacre was a hoax led to intense harassment of the parents of the dead children, whom Jones smeared as “crisis actors.” The jury awarded the parents $45 million in punitive damages (MSNBC, 8/5/22), and the world was treated to Jones learning under cross-examination that his text messages had fallen into the hands of the parents’ attorney, showing he had withheld evidence and opening up possible perjury charges against him (New York Times, 8/3/22).

The ordeal has been both cathartic and illuminating for the rest of society, which mostly sees Jones as a crackpot. Before the jury revealed its award to the parents, Jones put his media company into bankruptcy (Wall Street Journal, 8/1/22). He was already found liable in a similar Connecticut case (NPR, 11/16/21).

Jones’ empire of lies is often embraced with a sense of ridicule; there’s a whimsical quality to his rants about government chemicals turning frogs gay (New Statesman, 3/20/17) and promises to eat his neighbors (The Wrap, 5/1/20)—akin to Weekly World News headlines at the grocery store check-out aisle proclaiming the existence of Bat Boy (Mental Floss, 8/7/20).

And that circus-like quality has been good for Jones’ bank account. We learned this year that Jones took in $165 million selling supplements and other prepper gear (Rolling Stone, 1/7/22), and at the trial one economist estimated that Jones and his business “are worth up to $270 million” (LA Times, 8/5/22).

The phone disclosures from the trial reportedly show that there were “several days in 2018 in which Infowars made over $800,000 per day” (NBC, 8/3/22). In fact, in Jones’ divorce court proceedings, his lawyer stated that Jones is nothing like the character he plays in his act (NBC, 4/17/17), assuring us that he is less a hallucinating madman than an old-school vaudevillian who cares about one thing: sales.

The Sandy Hook case changed things, largely because his repeated fabrications so obviously rubbed salt in the wounds of grieving parents. He mobilized his audience to torment the victims of carnage, as if they were foot soldiers of the message from which Jones profits but his viewers do not (AP, 8/1/22). Both the recent trial coverage, and the new movie, remind us that none of that could exist without helpers.

‘Tricky to distinguish’

Yahoo: Infowars Whistleblower: Staff Laughed At Pleas To Stop Pushing Sandy Hook Lies

HuffPost (via Yahoo News, 7/29/22): “It’s something else…to not only hear the damage that you’re doing to people outside of your zone, but to actually laugh about it.”

No radio or television show operates without dedicated staff, and during the trial Infowars producer Daria Karpova “ingratiated herself with the jury by remarking sympathetically that it’s very stressful being Alex Jones, because people tell horrible lies about him” (Above the Law, 7/29/22)—a claim that can either be read as classic chutzpah or an almost paternalistic loyalty to Jones.

One former Infowars employee revealed at the recent trial that he was “laughed at after repeatedly warning staff to stop publishing falsehoods about Sandy Hook,” indicating the complicity of the rest of the staff (HuffPost, 7/29/22). Jones wasn’t even alone in promoting the lies about the Sandy Hook parents on air–Infowars contributor Owen Shroyer, who testified in the recent trial, had also gone on Infowars to help bash the grieving parents (Austin American-Statesman, 7/29/22).

The films director, in coming out with positive spin for Jones, makes one wonder what she’s attempting to accomplish. Moyer’s previous documentary, TFW No GF, an exploration of the reactionary “incel” community (short for “involuntarily celibate”), suggests that she has some interest in the source of alt-right subcultures. Variety (5/6/20) described TFW No GF as a frenetic attempt to capture these online provocateurs’ essence, calling it “consistently difficult to watch, both in style and content,” adding  the “film feels like a sloppy PowerPoint presentation, intercutting juddery-looking drone shots and Dramamine-demanding vérité footage with a barrage of screenshots.”

But this confusion leaves it unclear whether she’s a fellow traveler or an outside journalist. “Moyers meets her subjects on their own turf, constructing such a complex portrait, it can be tricky to distinguish where she stands,” Variety said.

Racking up clicks

Gleen Greenwald interviewing Alex Lee Moyer and Alex Jones

Glenn Greenwald interviewing Alex Lee Moyer and Alex Jones at the premiere of Moyer’s film in Austin.

Reports about the Austin premiere of the Jones film do suggest where this film stands, however. Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald was so starstruck in his on-stage interview with Jones (Boing Boing, 7/26/22) that he said Jones’ admission that he was wrong about Sandy Hook showed “the soulful Alex Jones,” when Jones had, in fact, been pressed to do so because of litigation. Such sycophancy should perhaps be unsurprising, given that Greenwald started his career as a lawyer for a white nationalist (New York Times, 3/9/05) and has ended up as a second banana on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight (Salon, 5/24/22), a venue also known for far-right conspiracy theorizing (Washington Post, 7/20/22). But because Greenwald long focused his journalistic career on exposing state secrets, including helping Edward Snowden blow the whistle on National Security Agency surveillance (Guardian, 6/11/13), his chummy pairing with Jones gives Infowars’ conspiracy-mongering an unearned air of honest questioning of government narratives.

Also at the film’s Austin premiere, according to New York (7/29/22), were a number of luminaries of the alt-right and post-left media circuit, including Anna Khachiyan of the podcast Red Scare. She was reportedly joined by her partner Eli Keszler, an “experimental percussionist and sound artist” (Pitchfork, 10/22/18) who composed the musical score for the film, providing a kind of sophisticated and avant garde veneer to a notorious philistine. The duo aren’t simply fans of Jones, then; they’re financially and artistically connected to Moyer’s project—Red Scare even dedicated an episode (11/22/21) to a friendly discussion with Jones and Moyer.

“Taking photos or even collaborating with Alex Jones seems to be an easy way to rack up clicks, first and foremost,” arts journalist William Harrison told FAIR.

Media allies

CNN: Social media abuzz over Piers Morgan vs. Alex Jones

CNN (1/7/13) boasted of the social media buzz it got from platforming Alex Jones.

Media allies have played a role in ensuring Jones has had a bigger microphone than just Infowars. The Washington Post (8/5/22) reported:

Jones going on the Joe Rogan Experience in 2020 allowed him to push false claims about coronavirus vaccination on Spotify, where he had been banned. A clip shared widely on Twitter this week shows how Rogan, whose show has an estimated audience of 11 million per episode, has previously defended Jones as “hilarious” and having entertainment value.

Jones’ appearance on the Rogan show caused an uproar within Spotify (BBC, 10/29/20), but the damage was done.

More centrist media have also done their part. CNN (1/7/13) brought Jones to speak about gun control with Piers Morgan, presumably to draw attention to the network. Jones had earlier been interviewed on ABC‘s The View (2/28/11) and later by Megyn Kelly on NBC (6/18/17). As Parker Molloy (Present Age, 8/5/22) wrote recently, “All that ABC, CNN and NBC did in these cases was help make Jones a household name, guaranteeing him more subscribers and a larger profile moving forward.”

And many other businesses depend on Jones: The New York Times (7/24/22), citing FAIR’s research (2/11), outlined one of Jones’ key business relationships, noting that

misinformation can also be hugely profitable, not just for the boldface names like Mr. Jones, but also for the companies that host websites, serve ads or syndicate content in the background.

Banal accomplices

Remora attached to a shark

A remora gets a free ride (cc photo: Brian Snelson).

All of these people and companies have to some extent affixed themselves to Jones and his image like remoras on a shark—not necessarily because they long to inspire wackos to attack parents of murder victims. They’re more likely motivated by a cold calculus that he’s a media beast whose controversy can move their careers forward, feeding an audience that hungers for nihilist transgression.

Jones’ empire clearly helps put a lot of food on the table for a great many people. Do they know there’s a social cost to helping him? Well, as Upton Sinclair said, “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on not understanding it.”

Jones is also connected to the deadly January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill insurrection (New York Times, 4/20/22). The Jones machine is more than entertaining insanity—he’s propaganda for a frightening, anti-democratic ideology, with a far-right agenda that’s on the record. Jones now faces financial hurdles and possible other legal ramifications because of both Sandy Hook and January 6. Those who are helping him advance through the media, and to defend himself from consequences, are his banal accomplices. There should be social consequences for them, too.

The post Forget Alex Jones—Look at His Helpers appeared first on FAIR.


This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/18/forget-alex-jones-look-at-his-helpers/feed/ 0 324642 Let’s not forget about the heatwave now it’s over https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/17/lets-not-forget-about-the-heatwave-now-its-over/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/17/lets-not-forget-about-the-heatwave-now-its-over/#respond Wed, 17 Aug 2022 10:54:26 +0000 https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/heatwave-covid-pandemic-climate-change/ Many acted like COVID was over once restrictions ended. Let’s not do the same with the latest devastating heatwave


This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Maysa Pritilata.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/08/17/lets-not-forget-about-the-heatwave-now-its-over/feed/ 0 324223 Next PM shouldn’t forget Johnson’s attitude to sexual assault was his undoing https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/12/next-pm-shouldnt-forget-johnsons-attitude-to-sexual-assault-was-his-undoing/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/12/next-pm-shouldnt-forget-johnsons-attitude-to-sexual-assault-was-his-undoing/#respond Tue, 12 Jul 2022 00:02:00 +0000 https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/boris-johnson-sexual-assault-victims-survivors-westminster/ As a Westminster staffer, I saw first-hand how victims are ignored and perpetrators of sexual assault are protected


This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Becky Paton.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/07/12/next-pm-shouldnt-forget-johnsons-attitude-to-sexual-assault-was-his-undoing/feed/ 0 314595 We Can’t Forget Vincent Chin https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/22/we-cant-forget-vincent-chin/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/22/we-cant-forget-vincent-chin/#respond Wed, 22 Jun 2022 18:30:53 +0000 https://progressive.org/op-eds/cant-forget-vincent-chin-jenkins-nguyen-220622/
This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Brad Jenkins.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/22/we-cant-forget-vincent-chin/feed/ 0 309113 On Juneteenth, Don’t Forget Black Texans https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/18/on-juneteenth-dont-forget-black-texans/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/18/on-juneteenth-dont-forget-black-texans/#respond Sat, 18 Jun 2022 12:00:00 +0000 https://progressive.org/latest/on-juneteenth-dont-forget-black-texans-miller-220618/
This content originally appeared on The Progressive — A voice for peace, social justice, and the common good and was authored by Rann Miller.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/18/on-juneteenth-dont-forget-black-texans/feed/ 0 308170 Tiananmen massacre vigil organizer says Hongkongers ‘refuse to forget’ despite ban https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/chiu-06022022104357.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/chiu-06022022104357.html#respond Thu, 02 Jun 2022 14:44:10 +0000 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/chiu-06022022104357.html Chiu Yan-loy, a community officer in Hong Kong's Tsuen Wan district and former leading member of the now-disbanded Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, won't be lighting candles in Victoria Park this year. The once-annual vigil commemorating those who died at the hands of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) as it crushed a weeks-long peaceful protest on Beijing's Tiananmen Square has been effectively banned for the third year running. Chiu has already served eight months in prison for taking part in an unauthorized vigil in 2020. Instead, Hongkongers will be remembering the dead in private, amid a city-wide crackdown on public dissent under a draconian national security law.

Chiu Yan-loy: I have no regrets. It was an honor for me to be sentenced as a dissident-in-mourning on June 4. Commemorating the massacre in itself is not a crime, and making it one is political suppression and nothing more. I choose to stay in Hong Kong to endure this situation. More than 10,000 other people in Victoria Park at the same time of me also risked such charges. If I can carry the can for them, then that's what I'll do.

RFA: Will there be other events in Hong Kong?

Chiu Yan-loy: It's a luxury to hold a ceremony like that in today's Hong Kong. June 4 commemorations and candlelight vigils are a way of gathering a kind of strength. We won't see June 4 rallies again in Hong Kong, nor any [public] mourning.

RFA: What can be done instead?

Chiu Yan-loy: When I was in prison, I realized that the most unbearable thing was the feeling of loneliness; a sense that nobody cared about me. Visiting inmates is similar to the spirit of mourning June 4. Spiritual support makes them understand that they are not alone ... that there are still people who care about them. Helping them overcome their loneliness is the most important thing.

RFA: How are your former colleagues doing?

Chiu Yan-loy: I'm very sad that every one of them has wound up in jail or been suppressed in some way. However, I respect their choices. [Alliance leader Chow Hang-tung] had previously talked with me about her choices before [her prison sentences] and why she made them. I hope she has enough will-power to hang in there. I wish her well.

RFA: How are you doing?

Chiu Yan-loy: After I got out, I went back to the community to serve my residents through crowdfunding. There are many unknowns in the future, but I will keep up hope and perseverance. Hongkongers should have hope, and keep moving forwards.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.


This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chen Zifei.

]]> https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/chiu-06022022104357.html/feed/ 0 303748 UNHCR chief: World must not forget Rohingya refugees amid Ukraine crisis https://www.rfa.org/english/news/myanmar/un-rohingya-05252022160939.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/myanmar/un-rohingya-05252022160939.html#respond Wed, 25 May 2022 20:16:00 +0000 https://www.rfa.org/english/news/myanmar/un-rohingya-05252022160939.html Despite the Ukraine war, the world mustn’t forget about the plight of Rohingya and other refugees as well as the burden of their host countries, the head of the U.N.’s refugee agency pleaded Wednesday as he ended a five-day trip to Bangladesh.

The conflict stemming from the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its humanitarian fallout is straining resources everywhere, including in supporting the sprawling refugee camps in southeastern Bangladesh along the frontier with Myanmar, said Filippo Grandi, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

“I am here to remind the international community that there is not just Ukraine. Bangladesh has been bearing the responsibilities for five years and this support cannot decline,” he told a press conference in Dhaka.

“I will not accept it. I will put maximum pressure on all donor partners.”

“It is very important that the world knows this should not be forgotten …. The risk is there of marginalization of some of the crises because so many resources are absorbed, especially by the Ukraine emergency,” he added.

The camps in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar district house about 1 million Rohingya refugees, including 740,000 who fled atrocities during a military offensive in Myanmar’s Rakhine state in 2017.

But only 13 percent of the U.S. $881 million needed by humanitarian agencies this year to support the Rohingya refugees in the South Asian nation has been funded as of May.

“I am a bit worried... first of all, there are a bit more needs because there is also Bhashan Char, and now in Ukraine, in Afghanistan and a lot of other competing crises, we struggle a bit, but I am here also for that reason,” Grandi said.

Bhashan Char is a remote island in the Bay of Bengal where the Bangladesh government has relocated some 26,000 Rohingya refugees since December 2020, ostensibly to ease the burden on the crowded mainland camps in Cox’s Bazar.

During his stay in Bangladesh, Grandi visited refugee camps in both Cox’s Bazar and on Bhashan Char.

Grandi said the war in Ukraine had added an additional financial burden on the United Nations, which was affecting the Rohingya camps as well.

“The Ukraine emergency is posing a problem here as well. We buy liquid gas for … [these] camps. That price has gone up a lot and this is a direct impact of the crisis,” he said.

When asked, Grandi acknowledged that funding for the Rohingya refugees would be more difficult than before.

“I think the government knows that, we know that, and the donors know that.”

The solution to the Rohingya crisis lies in Myanmar, the UNHCR chief said.

“The Rohingya refugees I met reiterated their desire to return home when conditions allow. The world must work to address the root causes of their flight and to translate those dreams into reality,” Grandi said.

Filippo Grandi (center), the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, walks inside the Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar district in Bangladesh, May 22, 2022. Credit: UNHCR.
Filippo Grandi (center), the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, walks inside the Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar district in Bangladesh, May 22, 2022. Credit: UNHCR.
Grandi talked with Rohingya about their situation during his visit to refugee camps earlier this week, said Kin Maung, the founder of the Rohingya Youth Association in Cox’s Bazar.

“We hope, following the visit of UNHCR boss, the process of repatriation will get more focus,” he told BenarNews.

“We want to return to our homeland with dignity.”


This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.

]]> https://www.rfa.org/english/news/myanmar/un-rohingya-05252022160939.html/feed/ 0 301778 ‘Only those we forget die’: Losing a brother to smuggling gangs https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/12/only-those-we-forget-die-losing-a-brother-to-smuggling-gangs/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/12/only-those-we-forget-die-losing-a-brother-to-smuggling-gangs/#respond Thu, 12 May 2022 06:01:07 +0000 https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/only-those-we-forget-die-losing-a-brother-to-smuggling-gangs/ Rodrigo used to smuggle people. Now he dreams of a life far from violence and poverty


This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by openDemocracy RSS.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/12/only-those-we-forget-die-losing-a-brother-to-smuggling-gangs/feed/ 0 298177 Don’t forget our midwives, warns Fiji women’s advocacy group https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/05/dont-forget-our-midwives-warns-fiji-womens-advocacy-group/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/05/dont-forget-our-midwives-warns-fiji-womens-advocacy-group/#respond Thu, 05 May 2022 06:25:04 +0000 https://asiapacificreport.nz/?p=73604 Asia Pacific Report newsdesk

The Fiji Women’s Rights Movement warned today that the value of midwives in the Pacific country was being undermined because of a lack of training and proper planning, and little urgency over the creation of positions.

In a message to mark the International Day of the Midwife on May 5, the FWRM highlighted the important role that midwives play in Fiji’s health sector for mothers and their newborn babies.

“The contribution of midwives to universal health coverage in terms of sexual, reproductive, maternal and newborn health, and strategies to fill the service gaps worldwide is rarely mentioned,” said the statement.

“The barriers they face in their professional environment are not often highlighted.”

More than 65 percent of World Health Organisation (WHO) member states were reported 2020 to have less than 50 nursing and midwifery personnel per 10,000 population (about 40 countries in the WHO African region and 25 in the WHO Americas region).

In many countries, said the statement, nurses and midwives constituted more than 50 percent of the national health workforce.

Pacific data on midwives was limited, the statement said.

Nurses resigning
Earlier this year, Fiji Nursing Association president Dr Alisi Vudiniabola warned that nurses were resigning because of stress, fatigue and lack of compensation.

The same was stressed by Shamima Ali of the Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre.

“We see that nurses are leaving for greener pastures and inexperienced nurses are being promoted to lead units in divisional hospitals which means an impact on service delivery,” said the statement.

In the same article covered by The Fiji Times, Dr Vudiniabola shared a report from one hospital where the nurse manager had been working alone, looking after 28 patients as most of the nurses were “sick and tired”.

“The same is for midwives,” said the FWRM statement. “Midwife training is undertaken with no proper planning or positions being created, or positions are often held up, further undermining the value of midwives and the urgency of their work.”

According to the WHO, healthcare provided by midwives who were educated and regulated according to global professional standards was defined as a core strategy for decreasing maternal mortality rates and improving reproductive, maternal, and newborn health.

Midwives could provide 87 percent of sexual, reproductive, and maternal health services but before that can happen, such services needed to be legislated and regulated.

“An enabling environment that allows midwives to offer this full scope of services must be provided.”

Fiji’s commitments
Fiji had made its commitment to Sustainable Development Goals 3 and 4 addressing a reduction in maternal mortality rates but this had not been implemented, said the statement.

Based on reports received, midwives with relevant qualifications like such as the Post Graduate Diploma in Midwifery, Masters in Midwifery were still earning less than F$35,000 a year.

This was the case even when the scope of their work covered areas such as ante-natal clinic consultation, public awareness, births and deliveries, post-natal, retrieval of obstetric and gynecology emergencies in the field (usually handled by doctors), pediatrics, maternal child health, and public health (including immunisation to pre-school for the child).

Midwives also undertake administrative documentation, including maintenance of data repositories, which were not used by the Ministry of Economy in formulating national budgets.

As health communities in Fiji and globally marked International Midwives’ Day today, the FWRM urged the government and the health ministry to place more emphasis on the role of midwives in the health sector.

Queen’s Service Medal for NZ midwife
In New Zealand, midwives’ advocacy was marked on International Midwives’ Day when the Governor-General, Dame Cindy Kiro, presented Pukekohe midwife Claire Eyes with the Queen’s Service Medal at a Government House investiture ceremony which also recognised several covid-19 pandemic response and other service leaders.

Eyes had also assisted midwifery in the Pacific through Rotary and had organised leadership training for midwives and nurses in Australia.

Her citation said in part: “[Claire Eyes] helped prevent closure of the Pukekohe Maternity Unit in the 1990s and secured funding to start the Pukekohe Maternity Resource Centre.

“She was president of the New Zealand Nurses Organisation Franklin Branch. She was involved with negotiations for pay parity for nurses and midwives and assisted the Ministry of Health to set up a structure for midwives providing lead maternity care.

She was NZNO representative to the New Zealand Council of Women.”


This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/05/05/dont-forget-our-midwives-warns-fiji-womens-advocacy-group/feed/ 0 296516 Forget Everything You Know About Texas https://www.radiofree.org/2022/04/08/forget-everything-you-know-about-texas/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/04/08/forget-everything-you-know-about-texas/#respond Fri, 08 Apr 2022 22:39:57 +0000 http://www.radiofree.org/?guid=63bc2957eb8aad592b86f2ff3d7d3b99
This content originally appeared on The Laura Flanders Show and was authored by The Laura Flanders Show.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/04/08/forget-everything-you-know-about-texas/feed/ 0 289354 Let’s Not Forget https://www.radiofree.org/2022/03/08/lets-not-forget/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/03/08/lets-not-forget/#respond Tue, 08 Mar 2022 09:30:30 +0000 https://www.counterpunch.org/?p=236327 My friend in Canada sent me a message yesterday, she wrote: “This war in Ukraine must bring lots of painful memories of your own country.” I couldn’t respond to her message as I didn’t know which memory hurt me the most. Since the Russian Ukraine war started, I’ve been thinking about wars that were launched More

The post Let’s Not Forget appeared first on CounterPunch.org.


This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nesreen Melek.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/03/08/lets-not-forget/feed/ 0 279947 Forget Russia—Blame the Fossil Fuel Industry for Europe’s Gas Dependency https://www.radiofree.org/2022/02/19/forget-russia-blame-the-fossil-fuel-industry-for-europes-gas-dependency/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/02/19/forget-russia-blame-the-fossil-fuel-industry-for-europes-gas-dependency/#respond Sat, 19 Feb 2022 12:30:46 +0000 /node/334716
This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Tara Connolly.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/02/19/forget-russia-blame-the-fossil-fuel-industry-for-europes-gas-dependency/feed/ 0 275249 Forget Russia, blame the fossil gas industry for Europe’s energy supply crisis https://www.radiofree.org/2022/02/18/forget-russia-blame-the-fossil-gas-industry-for-europes-energy-supply-crisis/ https://www.radiofree.org/2022/02/18/forget-russia-blame-the-fossil-gas-industry-for-europes-energy-supply-crisis/#respond Fri, 18 Feb 2022 00:02:00 +0000 https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/russia-ukraine-europe-energy-supply-crisis/ Since 2014, Europe has become more dependent on fossil fuels from Russia. It didn’t have to be this way


This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Tara Connolly.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2022/02/18/forget-russia-blame-the-fossil-gas-industry-for-europes-energy-supply-crisis/feed/ 0 274967 Part 2 – Never Forget: 9/11 and the 20 Year War on Terror – Excerpts From the Online Event https://www.radiofree.org/2021/10/08/part-2-never-forget-9-11-and-the-20-year-war-on-terror-excerpts-from-the-online-event/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/10/08/part-2-never-forget-9-11-and-the-20-year-war-on-terror-excerpts-from-the-online-event/#respond Fri, 08 Oct 2021 18:13:48 +0000 https://www.projectcensored.org/?p=24504 This is Part 2 On the 20th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, Code Pink, Massachusetts Peace Action and several other co-sponsoring organizations, including Project Censored, held an online seminar…

The post Part 2 – Never Forget: 9/11 and the 20 Year War on Terror – Excerpts From the Online Event appeared first on Project Censored.


This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/10/08/part-2-never-forget-9-11-and-the-20-year-war-on-terror-excerpts-from-the-online-event/feed/ 0 383798 Never Forget: 9/11 and the 20 Year War on Terror – Excerpts From the Online Event https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/20/never-forget-9-11-and-the-20-year-war-on-terror-excerpts-from-the-online-event/ https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/20/never-forget-9-11-and-the-20-year-war-on-terror-excerpts-from-the-online-event/#respond Mon, 20 Sep 2021 18:58:26 +0000 https://www.projectcensored.org/?p=24484 On the 20th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, Code Pink, Massachusetts Peace Action and several other co-sponsoring organizations, including Project Censored, held an online seminar on the worldwide toll…

The post Never Forget: 9/11 and the 20 Year War on Terror – Excerpts From the Online Event appeared first on Project Censored.


This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

]]> https://www.radiofree.org/2021/09/20/never-forget-9-11-and-the-20-year-war-on-terror-excerpts-from-the-online-event/feed/ 0 383894