historical perspecitves

A Plague of Saints

J R Leach In the digital age, the incessant calls to action reverberate across the virtual landscape, summoning legions of fervent warriors to wage battles against perceived evils. This rallying cry, echoing the urgency of a multitude of crusades, permeates our online existence. Be it the casual dehumanization of entire swaths of people to the …

Empire of Hypocrisy

Paul Cudenec via Winter Oak In the middle of the 19th century, the British Empire ran into what what would today be termed a “public relations crisis”. Influential domestic voices were starting to criticise its industrial system and worldwide domination on ethical grounds, not least the art critic John Ruskin. He wrote that all he had …

Kickbacks, Corruption & Scandal: The History of the CDC

Michael Bryant The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) was founded in 1946 as a backwater quasi-governmental agency with a negligible budget and a handful of employees tasked with a simple mission: “prevent malaria from spreading across the nation.” Seventy-five years later it has metastasized into a multi-billion dollar bureaucratic behemoth that oversees and controls virtually …

BEST OF OFFG: “JFK and the War on Our Heroes”

Kit Knightly Republished as part of our ‘Best Of’ series, revisiting some of OffG’s Pre-Covid editorials – either because they help remind us of important realities easily overlooked nowadays, or because they take on added significance in a ‘post-covid’ world. The assassination of JFK has been a deeply personal issue for me since I was …