Articles
Articles
The 15th-Century Doctrine That Let Columbus 'Discover America' Is Now the Basis of Indian Policy in the US
Rebecca Nagle: The Supreme Court turned a backwards, racist papal bull into American law. It’s preventing this country from confronting a genocide. ... The Doctrine of Christian Discovery asserted simply that Christian Nations became the rightful owner of any land they found occupied by non-Christian people. Europeans used this international law, grounded in the racist presumption of European superiority, to colonize most of the earth. ... As recently as 2005, Justice Ginsberg — a liberal icon of the left — cited the Doctrine of Discovery in City of Sherrill v. Oneida Nation of Indians, stating that the Oneida Indian Nation could not exert sovereignty over land within their 1794 treaty territory the tribe had bought back. ... The attack on tribal sovereignty and the diminishment of the rights of Native Nations has real and current consequences for the lives of Native people...
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Oct 10, 2017, 11:51am
Articles
Wombward
Linh Dinh: I’m back in Hanoi. Noi Bai Airport was sparkling after its recent upgrade, and I rode into town on a wide, well-landscaped freeway named after general Vo Nguyen Giap. On both sides were shops and restaurants. ... A typical Vietnamese street is lined with shops and restaurants, with commerce often spilling onto the sidewalk, and until very recently, there were no Vietnamese neighborhoods that were strictly residential. ... Though you’ll find images of the hammer and sickle, Marx, Lenin and, of course, Ho Chi Minh throughout this country, there is nothing Communist or internationalist about Vietnam...
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Oct 7, 2017, 3:35pm
Articles
Unwrapping the Russia Enigma
Ernest Partridge: Issue One: Did Donald Trump and his surrogates “collude” with the Russians? Which Russians? And what is the nature of this “collusion”? ... Yes ... It is doubtful that Trump is deliberately “colluding” to serve the economic or strategic interests of the Russian Federation – or of the United States for that matter. ... the only “interests” that he cares about are Trump interests ... Trump, it seems, has dug himself into a deep hole with his Russian investments and loans, and with his association with a few shady characters both at home and abroad. ... Because of his numerous bankruptcies, law suits and contract violations, Trump is unable to obtain loans in the United States. He has found willing creditors in Russia...
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Oct 5, 2017, 2:20pm
Articles
Police Used Private Security Aircraft for Surveillance in Standing Rock No-Fly Zone
Alleen Brown, Will Parrish, Alice Speri: The FAA’s no-fly zone barred indigenous drone pilots from documenting the NoDAPL struggle, but private security aircraft continued surveillance. ... Documents obtained via open records requests, as well as material from court cases, reveal new details about how the FAA and state agencies helped police and private security companies wrest control of the airspace above the NoDAPL resistance from indigenous water protectors. ... Court documents confirm that DAPL security personnel were coordinating their flights with state agencies...
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Sep 29, 2017, 3:09pm
Articles
There Is No Rehabilitating the Vietnam War
Robert Freeman: The Vietnam War is beyond redemption and must be remembered and condemned for the calamity that it was. The Vietnam War was “one of the greatest American foreign policy disasters of the twentieth century.” ... In March 1965 ... a Pentagon briefing for Johnson stated that the true goals in the War were, “...70% to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat; 20% to keep South Vietnam (and adjacent territories) from Chinese hands; and 10% to permit the people of Vietnam a better, freer way of life.” ... Forgetting that lesson, or, worse, laundering it out of our memory so that we might go forward with cleansed consciences and fortified zeal for still more predation, would be a betrayal of itself that only the American people can resist...
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Sep 26, 2017, 12:21pm
Articles
Ken Burns’s War Stories
Bob Buzzanco: It’s a series of stories, but not really a history of the war. That’s the Burns-Novick trademark and it’s worked for a long time, making them famous and I suspect wealthy. But it substitutes vignettes for ideas, personal anecdotes for larger structural factors, bathos for analysis. And it ends up providing a misguided view of the war, one that has politically conservative consequences (ironic because Burns himself is openly liberal) by shifting attention away from the historical, material reasons for American intervention and focusing on 79 people interviewed who were directly involved in Vietnam. Instead of an exposé of aggressive militarism, they give us sentimental stories of survival and perseverance...
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Sep 22, 2017, 3:41pm
Articles
Buried Alive: Stories From Inside Solitary Confinement
Nathaniel Penn: It is brutal. It is torture by definition. It destroys the mind, body, and soul, making rehabilitation next to impossible. It is also outrageously expensive, and it doesn't work. Yet at the end of the Obama era, and the dawn of Trump's, isolation is as widely used as ever in the American penal system. And this is what it feels like. ... Nelson: The rule was nobody could be there with a [previously diagnosed] mental illness. What happens when you develop a mental illness while you're there? There was a guy who was there because he'd smoked marijuana while he was on probation; he cut off part of one of his testicles, and he also cut off some of his fingers. Another guy stood on top of the cement bunk and dove headfirst into the toilet, over and over, until he crushed his skull in...
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Sep 18, 2017, 10:14am
Articles
The lessons of Katrina that haven't been learned
MANY IMAGES coming out of Houston in the wake of Hurricane Harvey conjure up images of Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans ... One critical parallel between Hurricanes Harvey and Katrina is that, at their root, both were human-made disasters. Of course, each calamity was triggered by weather event ... After each of Houston's successive disastrous floods, experts devised flood mitigation and control systems, most of which were shelved because they conflicted with Houston's "grow fast, ask questions later" policies. ... For the past 40 years, both Democrats and Republicans have promoted neoliberal tenets that include austerity, a profound underfunding of the public sector and tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations...
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Sep 12, 2017, 10:34am
Articles
The fury of the oppressed at Attica
The Attica prison uprising of 1971 took place against the backdrop of atrocious conditions and the impact of the Black Power movement. Luke Pickrell tells the story. ... Given the horrendous conditions in Attica and the larger social and political context of the time, the uprising was less than a surprise for all involved. ... Torture, whether through solitary confinement or more traditional methods, was rampant. The plumbing was broken, and cells routinely flooded with feces. Showers were allowed once a week, and there wasn't enough food and water. The prison itself--designed for 1,600--was bursting with some 2,250 bodies. The guards were poorly trained and underpaid, with many working a second job ... ON SEPTEMBER 13, state troopers and guards retook the prison using state-issued and personal guns, including hunting rifles. Tear gas was dropped from a helicopter, and for six minutes, uniformed men shot blindly, eventually killing 28 prisoners and nine hostages...
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Sep 8, 2017, 11:26am
Articles
Dick Gregory - Comedian, Social Activist, Writer : 1932 - 2017
"...to be forced to vote for the lesser of two evils is really to have no choice at all. ...Under such circumstances the only real choice a person has is to exercise his right not to vote; to boycott the polls and refuse to participate in a process that mocks the concept of free elections." ... “Last time I was down South, I walked into this restaurant, and this white waitress came up to me and said, ‘We don’t serve colored people here.’ ... “I said, ‘That’s all right, I don’t eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken ... “About then these three cousins come in, you know the ones I mean, Klu, Klucks, and Klan, and they say ‘Boy, we’re giving you fair warning. ... Anything you do to that chicken, we’re going to do to you.’ So I put down my knife and fork, and I picked up that chicken and I kissed it.”...
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Aug 25, 2017, 3:56pm
 Articles
Hiroshima, August 6, 1945
"A bright light filled the plane," wrote Col. Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb. "We turned back to look at Hiroshima. The city was hidden by that awful cloud...boiling up, mushrooming." (Previously Published)
Aug 6, 2017, 12:00pm
Articles
A Healing Tree: Remembering Hiroshima
Every August 6, the anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima, I think of the people I met there fifteen years ago while doing research in Japan. ... “I had given up hope,” Numata-san confessed. “Then one day I was by the river and I saw this tree—I will take you to see it after lunch—and I noticed this tree had died in the bomb blast. It was still black and charred, but I noticed small branches beginning to grow. Somehow the tree had found a way to come back to life. And I thought, if this tree can do it, so can I. I came to visit the tree many times...
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Aug 5, 2017, 3:39pm
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10 Examples That Prove White Privilege Protects White People in Every Aspect Imaginable
Jon Greenberg: 1. I Have the Privilege of (Generally) Having a Positive Relationship with the Police ... 2. I Have the Privilege of Being Favored by School Authorities ... 3. I Have the Privilege of Attending Segregated Schools of Affluence ... 4. I Have the Privilege of Learning about My Race in School ... 5. I Have the Privilege of Finding Children’s Books that Overwhelmingly Represent My Race ... (Surely you can see where this is going!)
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Jul 28, 2017, 3:11pm
Articles
Dr. Schweitzer’s Lost Message
César Chelala: Early on his career he became a staunch peace activist. His activities in favor of world peace gained him the admiration of figures like Albert Einstein and Presidents Kennedy and Eisenhower. One day, looking at a herd of hippos in the Ogowe River, he developed his idea of “reverence for life.” According to it, “The greatest evil is to destroy life, to injure life, to repress life which is capable of development.” In 1952 he was awarded the Nobel Peace prize. The money from the award went to fund the creation of a village for lepers close to his hospital called “Village of Light,” for the hope it still brings to those affected by the disease...
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Jul 21, 2017, 12:54pm
Articles
Dismantling Power: The Zapatista Indigenous Presidential Candidate’s Vision to Transform Mexico from Below
Benjamin Dangl: María de Jesús Patricio, the 57-year-old traditional Nahua indigenous doctor and mother of three from western Mexico is the first indigenous woman to run for the presidency in Mexico. ... "No demand of our peoples, no determination and exercise of autonomy, no hope made into reality has ever corresponded to the electoral ways and times that the powerful call ‘democracy.’ Given that, we intend not only to wrest back from them our destiny which they have stolen and spoiled, but also to dismantle the rotten power that is killing our peoples and our mother earth...
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Jul 10, 2017, 10:44am
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