Category Archives: Current Affairs

After Charleston: Ban the Confederate Flag?? Let’s Do Something REAL.

And let me repeat his main point: the U.S. Civil War had two phases; only the first one ended in 1865, and southern white supremacists won the second phase.

They didn’t form a separate country; but they established a widespread common culture of segregation, maintained by both law and terrorism; and they recreated many slavery cognates.

Let’s call this the New-Confederacy. Not for nothing was the movie that became their epic called “The Birth of a Nation.”

Birth-of-a-nation

New-Confederate rule was somewhat disrupted in the 1960s; there have been some important changes since then. But the New-Confederate forces have come roaring back in the past decade, to regional dominance and national impact, on numerous fronts.

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The Photo I Hoped I’d Never See

It remains unclear how over 450 additional troops would overcome the central problem to the training effort in Iraq: a lack of recruits to train. . . . The announcement was greeted with indifference and scepticism in Iraq, where efforts to arm local Sunnis opposed to Isis have foundered and training programmes by the US have made little progress in producing disciplined Sunni fighters capable of challenging the militant group.
“The increase doesn’t have an effect,” said Hisham al-Hashimi, an Iraqi scholar and expert on Isis. “It is a weak step to reduce pressure from the media.”

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Two Unforgettable Profiles In Courage: 1969

David McReynolds on why he wrote the “Coming Out” article in 1969: “those of us who were homosexual hid this fact when we spoke of the Gandhian principle of absolute truth. Yes, truth and honesty about everything … except our own lives, which were in violation of the laws, and about which we had to keep silent in order to speak the truth about war and peace, racism, capitalism. Truth about everything… except the one thing that could destroy us.
My article was an effort to be honest at last.”

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