Anti-war

Several days a week, Laurie Hasbrook arrives at the Voices office here in Chicago. She often takes off her bicycle helmet, unpins her pant leg, settles into an office chair and then leans back to give us an update on family and neighborhood news. Laurie’s two youngest sons are teenagers, and because they are black teenagers in Chicago they are at risk of being assaulted and killed simply for being young black men. Laurie has deep empathy for families trapped in war zones. She also firmly believes in silencing all guns.

With the failure of the Democratic establishment, the crisis of liberal democracy is now seized by a new rise of power. The US empire with Trump as commander-in-chief has renewed its vow toward colonial domination. With nationalism and militarism in full swing, Trump’s America aims to radically alter the future of this country. His campaign slogan “make America great again” was a kind of historical revisionism, ignoring the deep oppression and inequality that runs beneath this nation’s history.

This fetishization of the 'British Soldier', emblem of the armed forces as a whole, has become pathological in its intensity in parallel with our foreign military interventions being prosecuted in an era of unprecedented political mendacity.

Free trade, debt and war are all part of the same package, each feeding off the other. They are – each of them – rackets in their own right and they are all symptoms of the same problem. That problem has to do with the fact that our government  – along with the rest of the world  – has entirely forgotten the basic concept of how a national economy actually “earns” its way to prosperity.

On Friday morning the vast majority of the world may well have a lot to celebrate, a principled socialist may have defied the ruling-class in becoming the Prime Minister of the world’s fifth largest economy. If this happens the world will never be the same again.
The post Why Corbyn Might Just Win appeared first on BSNEWS.

In B. Traven’s novel, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1927):
“All right,” Curtin shouted back. “If you are the police, where are your badges? Let’s see them.”
“Badges, to god-damned hell with badges! We have no badges. In fact, we don’t need badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking badges, you god-damned cabrón and chinga tu madre!”

The British government operated an “open door” policy that allowed Libyan exiles and British-Libyan citizens to join the 2011 uprising that toppled Muammar Gaddafi even though some had been subject to counter-terrorism control orders, Middle East Eye can reveal. Several former rebel fighters now back in the UK told MEE that they had been able to travel to Libya with […]

A victory, against the current odds, for a Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour will, if it adheres to positions he promoted when he won the party leadership by a margin even greater than Blair’s when the latter became leader, ensue in the promise of an overturning of neoliberalism.
The post The UK’s Epochal Election appeared first on BSNEWS.

  Veterans For Peace UK members John Bourton and Daniel Lenham each gave a fascinating talk at the Hexham Debates recently on ‘how to turn your child into a killer’ and ‘moral injury’ respectively. (See video above). John discusses ‘the psychological processes that go on to turn you from a child into a killer, which, essentially is what basic training […]
The post Moral Injury: The Wounded Soul appeared first on BSNEWS.

In the run-up to budget discussions, the Trump Administration floated various proposals for a dramatic increase in military spending on top of the already bloated $596 billion Pentagon budget. This, figure doesn’t even represent the true expenditures devoted to war-making and militarism in the $1.1 trillion discretionary side of the national budget. The $596 doesn’t include the $65 billion in veterans spending and $26 billion for nuclear weapons.