Edward Curtin ` Here’s a film about the 1950s – “The World As It Was” – that will tell you a great deal about life in the U.S.A. today, while disabusing anyone of the notion that nostalgia for that mephitic decade is in order, for it was a time when “democracy” tended toward totalitarianism. In …
Edward Curtin “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous,” warned Rev. King, “than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” How true those words. For the government that honors Dr. King with a national holiday killed him. This is the suppressed truth behind the highly promoted day of service. It is what you are not supposed …
Edward Curtin It is hard for those who have not lived through the shattering political assassinations of the 1960s to grasp their significance for today. Many might assume that that was then and long before their time, so let’s move on to what we must deal with today. Let some old folks, the obsessive ones, …
Edward Curtin Dear Bobby, As you know, I have supported your bid for the presidency even before you declared last spring. I have admired and believed in you for years, and when you entered the race I felt hope for the first time in decades that your non-violent impulses, honed by your tragic family history …
Edward Curtin On February 12, 2002 at a Pentagon news conference, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked by Jim Miklaszewski, the NBC Pentagon correspondent, if he had any evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was supplying them to terrorists. Rumsfeld delivered a famous non-answer answer and said: Reports that say that something hasn’t …
Edward Curtin “This is slavery, not to speak one’s thoughts.” Euripides, The Phoenician Women Some time ago on a Sunday evening when my wife and I had just sat down to dinner, our phone rang. Since I didn’t recognize the phone number and it was dinnertime, I hesitated to answer it, but for some chance reason …
Edward Curtin Social psychosis is widespread. In the words of the British psychiatrist, RD Laing, “The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.” He was not referring to raving, drooling, hitting-your-head-against-the-wall lunacy but a taken-for-granted acceptance of a world long …
Edward Curtin The world has been haunted by human violence since time immemorial. There are untold millions (billions?) of people all over the world who have been scarred by it in all its forms. There are two basic responses: one is to try to return that violence with violence and defeat one’s enemy; the other …
I can’t even produce a metaphor for the drug world anymore. I don’t even like the phrase the drug world since the phrase implies a different world.” ― Charles Bowden, Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family You don’t need a thousand hours studying what trauma is, what forms it might take, delving into […]
The post More than a “Syndrome”: Trauma, Distress, and Pain first appeared on Dissident Voice.
Edward Curtin “What they [regular people] need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and what may be happening within themselves….what may be called the sociological imagination.” …
