Marxism taught me what society was. I was like a blindfolded man in a forest, who doesn’t know where north or south is. If you don’t eventually come to truly understand the history of the class struggle, or at least have a clear idea that society is divided between the rich and the poor, and that some people subjugate and exploit other people, you’re lost in a forest, not knowing anything.
— Fidel Castro
He said he absolutely did not meddle in our election. He did not do what they are saying he did.
– President Trump re Vladimir Putin after their meeting in Vietnam.
I have already written a lot about Cambodia, but each time I return to this ancient and scarred country, I get so outraged by the cynicism that confronts me there, at every corner, that I have to start writing again, re-addressing the same essential issues that I have already been covering for years and decades.
One question always comes back to my mind:
Apparently there are seven things that piss off the Christian God more than anything else. And, not surprisingly, those seven things are all common traits in both those who worship Him and in those of us who doubt or deny His existence. Real or imaginary, you’ve gotta give the man upstairs credit for His sense of humor. Too funny…incorporate faults and flaws into our DNA, and then punish us for them. Even threats of Hellfire and damnation don’t seem to carry much weight in deterring good Christians from lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, or pride. One would strongly suspect tha
On November 18, just days before the 50th anniversary of United Nations Resolution 242, the US State Department took its first step towards severing its ties with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).
The timing of this decision could not be any more profound.
To some on the geopolitical stage, “stability” is something like a sacred word.
Of course, the devil is in the details. For decades, the word was used by successive US governments in a sense which did not preclude a certain number of wars – as long as those wars, whether officially declared or merely approved by an American President under the terms of some special Congressional authorization such as the one which is behind most current US military activity, were begun and carried out on American terms.
There is no image of prosperity which is not at the same time an image of crisis. I modify here Walter Benjamin’s famous dictum from Über den Begriff der Geschichte.1 For the current American context, we’ve advanced into a period where national prosperity is realized through social and cultural damage.
If he had lived, President John F. Kennedy would have been 100 years old this year. At Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow, his family would be raising a glass in his honor.
We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation.
— Martin Luther King, “Beyond Vietnam”
