News & Commentary from Veteran Writers/Activists
Forty two years ago, I was a soldier in the U. S. Army. It was 1969. The Viet Nam war was raging. Over 500 unarmed old men, women, and children had been murdered at My Lai by U.S. soldiers, and a pattern of war atrocities and White House lies about the war was being exposed. The South Vietnamese government was shown to be hopelessly corrupt and ineffective, and the South Vietnamese Army was unable to hold their own … [Read more...]
Israel is defeating itself, one battle at a time. The May 31, 2010 Israeli attack on the “Gaza Freedom Flotilla” - particularly on the Mavi Marmara - is a microcosm of Israel’s steady march to self-defeat. Six ships laden with supplies and international peace activists - including parliamentarians and other prominent figures - headed toward Gaza with the stated aim of breaking the Israeli blockade. Israeli ships, … [Read more...]
The March/April 2011 edition of Foreign Policy magazine has an article by General Stanley McChrystal (ret.), the former commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan from 2009 - 2010. In the print edition his article is titled, “Becoming the Enemy: To win in Afghanistan, we need to fight more like the Taliban.” (Oddly, the online version has a different title, “It Takes a Network: The new front line of modern … [Read more...]
Tonight on primetime, national TV a yearly sports ritual will commence, the National Football League Draft of the most gifted college players by the 32 NFL professional football teams scattered throughout the continental US. The NFL with its 32 teams comprises a monopoly of billionaire businesspersons, who hire some 1700 elite athletes that make up the 53-man rosters. A goodly number of the star players become … [Read more...]
The battle over the meaning of a traumatic experience is fought in the arena of political discourse, popular culture and scholarly debate. The outcome of this battle shapes the rhetoric of the dominant culture and influences future political action. Kali Tal, Worlds Of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma _______________ There’s a major struggle for meaning going on in America now that centers on war trauma … [Read more...]
“…get a man greedy enough and he got the guts to go – go, go, … Vietnam, hot damn.” -Norman Mailer, Why Are We In Vietnam? The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the program created by Congress to expend over $700 billion of our tax dollars to prevent a “meltdown of the financial system,” is a “colossal failure.” It’s now official. Neil M. Barofsky, the man hired as TARP’s special … [Read more...]
Since the start of the Bush era, soldiers and … [Read More...]
When does a determination to look on the bright … [Read More...]
