We should be concerned about Jagmeet Singh’s support for political violence. But not the stuff that’s making news. While the media makes much of the new NDP head’s ties/indifference to Sikh violence, they’ve ignored Singh’s leadership of a party/community that has repeatedly backed Canadian aggression.
I won’t even start with the old rule that when there’s a contract killing, it’s usually the killer who first offers their condolences.
— Nenad Čanak, Radio Free Europe, January 22, 2018
“The Balkans” – this notion that signifies more a state of mind than geographic location, usually derisively associated with powder kegs, ancient hatreds and “Asiatic” primitivism “in the heart of Europe” – has long ceased to occupy the headline pole position of the Clinton era. Used since the 1990s mostly as code for the violent dissolution of former Yugoslavia and the various spillover effects regionally and beyond – the term and its theme have been since displaced by waves of other real (and some imaginary) news, only occasionally to briefly flash back through mainstream Western media.
Theatre, hysterics, denunciations. No tight, orderly and sterile space could ever entirely contain those dark characters with lengthy butcher’s bills and blood soaked attributes. Screams accompanied accusations; words to make all blush were shouted at witnesses, lawyers and judges.
While Zimbabwe was changing under various inexorable forces of power, the more sterile surrounds of The Hague and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia offered the scene for a conviction.
The “Serb Warlord” or the “Butcher of Bosnia”, as he has been termed in various circles, had finally received a verdict few were doubting. One of the doubters was, naturally, the man himself, Ratko Mladić, who accused the judicial officers of incurable mendacity.
Alessandro Biancchi: Self-determination of peoples and respect for the borders and sovereignty of a country. This is of the most complicated issue for international law. How can it be articulated for the case of Catalonia?
Andre Vltchek: Personally, I’m not very enthusiastic about smaller nations forming their own states, particularly those in the West, where they would, after gaining ‘independence’, remain in the alliances that are oppressing and plundering the entire world: like NATO or the European Union.
On August 19, a week after a heavily publicized clash over a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, an estimated 8,000 people converged on Boston Common to protest a speaking event organized by a group calling itself the Boston Free Speech Movement. Who are the Boston Free Speech Movement and what do they stand for? We’ll never know because antifascists, leftists, anti-racists, and progressives of Boston prevented them from even speaking.
The Ancient Greeks knew: “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.” No less a figure than the late Zbigniew Brzezinski and the CIA made use of this saying by recruiting the Muslim Brotherhood to fight a proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, which led to the withdrawal of the Soviets from the Hindu Kush. Since then, the CIA used the mercenaries to fight more proxy wars in the Balkans, Chechnya, and Azerbaijan.
A century ago, a Southern academic and racist emerged in Europe and the United States as a crusader to “make the world safe for democracy”.1 Wilson had been elected president in 1913, the year before Europe’s imperialists plunged the world into four years of mass murder. That war alone caused some four million direct battle casualties and untold millions of non-combatant deaths in the aftermath.
If you walk through Times Square and try to locate yourself on your mobile GPS, you’ll find it often places you several blocks from where you are. One assumes the massive electricity being pumped through the grid sends GPS technology haywire. Tourists veer to and fro, led astray by their mobile masters. But you don’t need to come to New York to experience a dysfunctional GPS. Just tune in the Fareed Zakaria’s show GPS every Sunday at 10 a.m. on CNN. But prepare for a nauseating ride.
