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  • Wake Up! Washington’s alarming foreign policy
    31 March 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    4 comments

    Wake Up! Washington’s alarming foreign policy
    By Chalmers JohnsonMarch 31, 2005
    The Rubicon is a small stream in northern Italy just south of the city of Ravenna. During the prime of the Roman Republic, roughly the last two centuries B.C., it served as a northern boundary protecting the heartland of Italy and the city of Rome from its own imperial armies. An ancient Roman law made it treason for any general to cross the Rubicon and enter Italy proper with a standing army. In 49 B.C., (…)

  • The Man Who Fought for the Forgotten
    1 March 2005 par (Open-Publishing)

    Peter Benenson 1921-2005 Founder of Amnesty International
    by Antony Barnett
    There are not many newspaper articles that can genuinely claim to have changed the world for the better. But on Sunday, 28 May 1961, The Observer published a campaigning piece on the front of its Weekend Review section.
    The article was entitled ’The Forgotten Prisoners’ and it was by Peter Benenson, a 33-year old Eton-educated London lawyer.
    Benenson had been angered after learning about two Portuguese (…)

  • When Democracy Failed - 2005 : The Warnings of History
    27 February 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    5 comments

    by Thom Hartmann
    This weekend - February 27th - is the 72nd anniversary, but the corporate media most likely won’t cover it. The generation that experienced this history firsthand is now largely dead, and only a few of us dare hear their ghosts.
    It started when the government, in the midst of an economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. A foreign ideologue had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but the media largely ignored his relatively small (…)

  • The Evolution of Revolution: Part III: Expelling the Demons of the Opiate
    26 February 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    14 comments

    Part I - Part II
    Expelling the Demons of the Opiate
    Writer’s Note: This is a social criticism and commentary on religion, meant to stir thought and insight into a different way of seeing the world. My wish is not to offend anyone’s beliefs, only to open minds to new realms of understanding and to what just might be possible. I do not claim to be right, or to know the truth. Quite simply, I wish only for the reader to absorb this essay with an open mind, willing to challenge all they (…)

  • Activist Angela Davis Urges Examination of "New Racisms" at Vanderbilt Lecture
    25 February 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    4 comments

    by Anna Thompson
    Racism is not static. The racism we encountered in the civil rights era is not the same racism we encounter today. Now most people recognize it is not acceptable to explicitly support white supremacy, that is not to say they do not support it implicitly. The point I want to make is that just because the law no longer provides for the overt expression of racism does not mean that racism is not a major factor in our contemporary lives.
    I remember in the 60’s I was (…)

  • Remembering Malcolm X in the Place Where He Fell
    24 February 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    5 comments

    By COREY KILGANNON
    Ilyasah Shabazz, 42, the third-eldest daughter of Malcolm X, stared across the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights at the spot where her father was assassinated in front of her 40 years ago today.
    She looked at the area that had held a stage where his body lay riddled with bullets and pointed to the spot where she, almost 3 years old, was sitting in a banquette with two of her sisters and her mother, Betty Shabazz, pregnant with twins.
    Feb. 21, 1965, was a Sunday, (…)

  • The Evolution of Revolution: Part I of III: The Human Animal
    11 February 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    10 comments

    Part II - Part III
    by Manuel Valenzuela
    "Information Clearing House" - - As long as humankind has walked the plains of Earth, from our origins in the jungles of Africa to our great Diaspora out of savannas and into all corners of the globe, we have had to wage ceaseless battle with the demons living inside the human condition. Embedded in our psyche, ingrained in our being, passed down generation after generation like a torch of eternal damnation lighting the way through the deep caverns (…)

  • Robert Fisk : Iraq, 1917
    18 June 2004 par (Open-Publishing)
    2 comments

    by Robert Fisk
    They came as liberators but were met by fierce resistance outside Baghdad. Humiliating treatment of prisoners and heavy-handed action in Najaf and Fallujah further alienated the local population. A planned handover of power proved unworkable. Britain’s 1917 occupation of Iraq holds uncanny parallels with today - and if we want to know what will happen there next, we need only turn to our history books...
    On the eve of our "handover" of "full sovereignty" to (…)