protests

In front of White House
Americans are angry. I suspected they would be, but I got confirmation that they are, all over the place: in Miami, Washington D.C., Baltimore, Minneapolis, New York, and Boston. Basically, everywhere I went, while “taking pulse and temperature” of this country where I used to live, cumulatively, for more than a decade, I felt frustration and bewilderment.

Multinational corporations operate under the guise of ‘wokeness,’ while exploiting those abroad.
Alberto BUFALINO

Three years ago, I visited Old Supreme Court Building in Hong Kong, also known as The Court of Final Appeal, together with my friend, an Afghan-British lawyer, who was on a personal mission of ‘re-discovering Asia.’

Anonymous masked federal agents in military uniforms jump out of unmarked minivans, abducting seemingly random people on the street in Portland, frightening new viral videos show. Officers from the U.S. Marshals Special Operations Group and Customs and Border Protection’s BORTAC have been sent to the city to tamp down of 49 days of continuous demonstrations against racist police brutality. The move appears to be the Trump administration’s latest tactic to crush the nationwide protests that erupted in late May over the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police.

Many contributors on this platform have rightly pointed out the two most perplexing developments within the United States this century that carry truly terrifying implications for the peace and stability of the entire world:

If we find indiscriminate state violence in our streets appalling, we should feel similarly about state violence abroad,  write Medea Benjamin  and Zoltán Grossman.
Medea BENJAMIN, Zoltán GROSSMAN
Since George Floyd was murdered, we have seen an increasing convergence of the “war at home” against black and brown people with the “wars abroad” that the U.S. has waged against people in other countries.

In the past year there have been protests in Hong Kong that were aimed locally and at the Beijing government. There were two deaths: one of a student who fell from a high-rise car park, and one of 70 year-old man who was hit by a brick thrown by a black-clad protestor.

Can there ever be a true revolt that is led by the spoiled Children of the Élite? If so, what would such a ‘revolt’ mean in America? Well, 25-years ago, a prescient American cultural historian, Christopher Lasch, foresaw just such a revolution. He wrote a book – Revolt of the Élite – to describe how, already in 1994, he perceived what lay ahead: A social revolution that would be pushed forward by radical children of the bourgeoisie. Their leaders would have almost nothing to say about poverty or unemployment.

On the evenings of July 7th and 9th, a wave of unrest swept through several Serbian cities – chiefly Belgrade – in opposition to an announcement from Vučić that Belgrade would return to the government mandated coronavirus quarantine lockdowns.