The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. Let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all. It is true the population has increased.
— Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
March 21 was the 57th anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre that was carried out by the South African apartheid regime against protesting Africans in 1960. This protest was organized by the liberation organization, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC). It targeted the pass law of the settler-colonial regime that regulated the movement and residential pattern of the indigenous Africans.
South Korean author Han Kang has written two short novels translated into English in the past five years.
In the West, even among people who consider themselves not susceptible to government-corporate media propaganda, any wild story about North Korea can be taken as credible. We should ask ourselves why that is the case, given what we know about the history of government and media fabrications, often related to gaining our acquiescence to a new war.
Human rights groups and Palestinian leaders have condemned what they called the “extremely lenient” punishment of Elor Azaria, the Israeli army medic who was filmed executing a severely wounded Palestinian in Hebron last year.
On Tuesday, a military tribunal sentenced the soldier to 18 months in jail and a demotion, nearly a year after he shot a bullet from close range into the head of 21-year-old Abdel al-Fattah al-Sharif.
While the basket of delighted deplorables dances in the streets, celebrating its right wing populist victory, and Clinton’s liberal legions still lament the unlikely, unexpected, unacceptable coronation of President Donald Trump, I’ve worn a raw, bloody hole in my scalp, scratching my head in wonder. Trump seemed to come out of nowhere. He made mincemeat out of his Republican rivals, then proceeded to make serial war criminal Hillary look like someone I wouldn’t trust to wash my car, let alone lead my country for the next four years. Come to think of it, Hillary did that all on her own.
Former Ronald Reagan administration official Paul Craig Roberts continues to take aim at the Left. Why this time? Apparently Roberts supports Trump’s ban on Muslims (a ban on people from seven countries, all Muslim majority countries).
“The mindlessness is unbearable,” writes Roberts of the Left’s protesting the selective ban on refugees and migrants.
Roberts argues,
Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
— Martin Luther King, Strength to Love, 1963
The Russian ambassador was killed in Ankara on the evening of Dec. 19 . The killer, a 22-year-old Turkish graduate of the police academy who had been fired in July after being deemed untrustworthy, fired 11 bullets into the ambassador’s back as he finished addressing the attendees at the opening of the Russia Through Turkish Eyes photo exhibit.
