Bulletin
N° 816
"Le roi et l' oiseau"
https://archive.org/details/LeRoiEtLOiseau_201709
(1h 22min)
d'après La Bergère et le Ramoneur de Hans Christian Andersen, et sorti au cinéma le 19 mars 1980.
_______________________________
Subject : GAZA = GUERNICA : THE BEGINNING OF WORLD WAR III . . . ?
20 September 2018
Grenoble,
France
Dear
Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
The
trajectory of my own education, like many non-fascist bourgeois youth of my
generation, passed through the ideological formations of individualism,
romanticism, political reformism, radical opportunism, and socialism. (For some obscure
reason, I was saved from the influences of nationalism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and the
more virulent forms of sexism - these
latter cultural manifestations simply disgusted me from the very first encounter.)
My interest in literature
For better or for worse, this was the starting point of my intellectual development; and
like many other people, it has taken me through a series of unexpected turns . . . .
For
these reasons, I paid attention when Daniel Ellsberg (b. 1931) made his famous
statement during the Anti-Vietnam War Movement: “The United States is not on the wrong side in this war; it is the wrong side!” The
ideological clarity in the late 1960s energized the movement, and
the growing solidarity with peasants who were trying to defend themselves against the
high-tech imperialist massacres seemed to hold the promise of a new world. The
movement in the US was naturally evolving into an Anti-Capitalist uprising
against labor exploitation and in opposition to the private ownership of the means of
production.
History
is rife with similar acts of resistance against Militarism and Imperialism: The artist
Francisco Goya (1746-1828), for example, was an effective critic of
militarism; he captured contemporary realities and exposde the
hypocrisy of the bourgeois revolutionary heritage of capitalist expansion in
his time.
“The Third of May”
(Execution of the Defenders of Madrid, 1808)
Another, ardent critic of
the capitalist system was British historian E. P. Thompson (1924-1993), whose empathy and
scholarly understanding of William Morris (1834-1896) is no less than
remarkable. His 1955 seminal study of Morris’s political and spiritual evolution
provides a detailed account of the evolution of a complex relationship
between social life and intellectual development in Victorian
England, where “only the ledger lives.” Morris came from a wealthy family, and,
although he inherited substantial wealth, he maintained a critical assessment
of his bourgeois origins and the milieu
for his entire life, as indeed Thompson himself did :
[I]n the large middle class which
stretched from Richard Potter and his fellow financiers at the top to the
nonconformist tradesmen at the bottom, it ['Self-Help'] tended to take the form
of complacent self-interest, shored up by occasional acts of charity and
self-righteous philanthropy. The rich first robbed the poor, then
preached to them that their poverty was the result of their own sin. The
“Victorian” middle-class family was becoming (as Morris later described it)
'framed on the model of . . . an affectionate and moral tiger to whom all is prey a few yard from the sanctity of the
domestic hearth'. Of course, there was lip-service enough to noble social
ambitions. Paeons of praise to the achievements of
capitalist society, rhetoric about progress, lofty schemes for social
advancement, were on every politician’s lips. But so long as the prosperity of
the few rested upon the hell of East London and the slums of the great towns,
so long as the ethic of self-interest dominated in all social life, it was
impossible for men to feel any real identity of interest between their lives
and the 'commonwealth'. . . .
[T]he working of man’s conscience is a complex
matter, and certainly many typical 'Victorians' did not feel themselves to be
hypocrites. [They rather] liked to appear to
themselves, as well as to others, as enlightened, humane, in the forefront of
progress. To Mathew Arnold (whose Culture and Anarchy was published in 1869,
the same year as a part of [Morris’s] The Earthly Paradise) the middle classes
were not so much hypocrites as the 'Philistines', 'mechanically worshipping
their fetish of the production of wealth and of the increase of manufactures
and population, and looking neither to the right nor left so long as this
increase goes on'. The Philistines, he said, 'have developed one side of their
humanity at the expense of all others, and have become incomplete and mutilated
men in consequences'. The word “mutilated” gives a clue perhaps as important as
any other in Matthew Arnold’s book. The characteristic 'Victorian' middle-class
sensibility was made up of a veritable complex of involuntary inhibitions and
evasions, the sum of which made up that shallow culture in which both
sentimentality and hypocrisy flourished. The greatest evasion of all was to be
found in the hallowing of the 'laws of supply and demand”, as God’s laws” or
“Nature’s simplest laws', to hide the fact of the exploitation of man by man.
Around this central evasion a thousand others grew unchecked. The rentier class in the London suburbs, in the
cathedral and university cities, might cultivate a love of nature or an
interest in foreign missions and charities, while remaining in ignorance of the
source of their own incomes. The sons of the self-made mill owners were given
an expensive education, which equipped them with an earnest sense of their own
moral mission of leadership, for no better reason than that their fathers had
been able to pay their fees. In every field of life and of art these evasions
and this confusion of wealth with righteousness re-appears.
In complex ways (which [Samuel] Butler was to lay bare in The Way of All Flesh (1903))
the reduction of human values to property values, the pressure of
‘respectability’ and of orthodoxy, made the ‘Victorians’ ashamed of all the
vitalities of life which could not be harnessed to the chariot of ‘Self-help’.
The Middle classes eased their own consciences by accusing the poor of being
guilty of indigence, intemperance, and sensual and sexual excess: even the Beehive announced in 1869 that one of the foremost duties of
working-men M.P.s (if elected) would be to ‘diminish the growing passion for
mere sensual indulgence’. It was as if the ethic of ‘Self-Help’ had desiccated
man’s feelings, so that they were reduced to tinder within him. But let the
spark of life enter through any route – the sympathies of love, the passion for
truth or liberty, the energies of childhood – and all
might be kindled to one flame or revolt. And for fear of this, Mrs. Grundy*
covered her bare skin down to her ankles, gathered her children close to her,
and tightened her lips in hostility to life.
Of course, such a limitation of intellect
and sensibility was not imposed suddenly and uniformly upon a whole class.
Rather, it resembled a poison seeping through the veins of society, and yet
continually resisted by the forces of life. Sometimes its oncoming was
consciously felt, as by [Alfred] Tennyson (1809-1892) when composing Maud
(1855):
.
. . these are the days of advance, the works of the
men of mind,
When who but a fool would
have faith in the tradesman’s ware or his word?
Is it peace or war? Civil
war, as I think and that of a kind
The viler,
as underhand, not openly bearing the sword.
Sooner or later I too may
passively take the print
Of the
golden age – why not? I have neither hope nor trust;
May make my heart as a
millstone, set my face as a flint,
Cheat and be cheated, and
die: who knows? we are ashes and dust.
Peace sitting under her
olive, and slurring the days gone by.
When the poor are hovell’d and hustled together, each sex, like swine,
When only the ledger lives,
and when only not all men lie;
Peace in her vineyard – yes ! – but a company forges the
wine.
And the vitriol madness
flushes up in the ruffian’s head,
Till the filthy by-lane rings
to the yell of the trampled wife,
And chalk and alum and
plaster are sold to the poor for bread,
And the spirit of murder
works in the very means of life. . . .’
Moreover, by seeking to
describe the ‘typical’ Victorian attitudes, we necessarily pass over the
spirited resistance to them in one field after another of life, the conflict
within the middle class itself. These years are also years of great advances in
scientific theory: of the battle between Darwinism and obscurantism: of the
movement among women of the middle class for educational, legal and
professional rights: of the militant secularist agitation in the face of Mrs.
Grundy. The courage of Charles Bradlaugh and Annie
Besant in publishing facts about birth control can only be estimated if we
recall the virulence of the Christian tracts and handbills called forth by
their action:
WHAT ARE THEY OFFERING TO US . . . ?
'Sensuality, Free Love, and a foul system by which
animated nature can be destroyed, and increase of population prevented, thus
opening
up the way for universal
Prostitution. . . . This is the beastliness that is held up to the youth of our
land, under the misleading names of Free-thought,
Agnosticism, Atheism, and
Secularism. But which is in reality bold, rampant, God-defying, Christ-despising,
Blaspheming INFIDELITY.
BEWARE
‘Be sure your SIN will find YOU out.’
But the strength of these
‘Victorian’ attitudes is to be measured less by the number of courageous
opponents of them than by the degree to which even these opponents revealed in
one part or another of their outlook the same impoverished sensibility. Even
the finest and most sensitive minds did not entirely escape the taint of this
poison (not Dickens nor George Eliot nor Matthew Arnold) although the fight
they put up was strenuous, and their victories many times more noble than their
defeats.(pp.176-179)
Even William Morris, who
enjoyed a widely held respect for his views, his honesty and his courage, was
not immune to bourgeois ethnocentrism of Victorian London. He nevertheless
transcended his social class biases with astounding lucidity. The years 1887
and 1888, writes Thompson, were “confused years in the history of the British
Socialist movement.”
They are the years of the
confluence of the small clear-water stream of Socialist theory with the broad
waters of the labour movement. Everywhere there were
eddies, back-waters, cross-currents. Although Socialist opinion was spreading
rapidly during these ears, there was no comparable increase in the membership
of either the S.D.F. or the Socialist League. Indeed, one consequence of the
penetration by the Socialists of the mass movement was the disintegration of
the two Socialist bodies themselves.
Already by the first month of 1887, some
of Morris’s first fervor had spent itself, and he looked on the prospect ahead
with foreboding. He did not abate the work of the pro)agenda
one jot. But he had came to realize more of the forces
pitted against it. The ‘Revolution’ seemed less and less likely to fall in his
own life-time.(p.503)
In February of 1887, Morris wrote
an article for Commonweal, "Facing the Worst of It,” in which he wrote;
“Though we Socialists [have] full faith in the certainty of the great change
coming about, it would be idle . . . to prophesy . . . the date . . . and it is
well for us not to be too sanguine, since overweening hope is apt to give birth
to despair if it meets with . . . disappointment." (p.504) Morris then proceded to outline three possibilities of the system’s prolongation before
ultimate collapse:
1st.
the lessening of stocks and consequent slight temporary recovery; 2nd,
A great European war, perhaps lengthened out into a regular epoch of war; and 3rd,
The realization of the hopes of important new markets, which hopes are the real
causes of hostility between nations.(p.504)
Thompson went on to
comment on Morris’s prescience: “Apart from these three – recurrent and
temporary trade recovery, war, and opening of fresh markets – Morris referred
(can it be with a prophetic vision of fascism?) to
‘more speculative possibilities . . . which would lead to more ruin and
suffering than even those . . . . These
three possibilities, Morris felt, were not without opportunities for the
Socialists, if the other current, that of conscious and organized hope could be
brought to hasten the downfall of capitalism.” (p.504)
This discussion of
“contact with the masses” continues with a rich description of Morris’s
creative interactions with the working class, in an invaluable section
entitled, “Jonah’s view of the Whale.”(pp.506-512)
Thompson maintains a
historical perspective of his subject. He, for example, judges that Morris was
in no small part responsible for the failure of the Socialist League to
increase in influence and number after 1887, which instead was “left behind and
isolated by its own purism.”(p.551)
Morris had summed up his
position on electoral politics in a letter to Glaiser
dated May 19, 1887, days before the Socialist League’s decisive Annual
Conference:
We
should treat the Parliament as a representative of the enemy. . . . We might for some
definite purpose be forced to send members to Parliament as rebels . . .
but under no circumstances to help to carry on their Government of the country
. . . and therefore we ought not to put forward palliative measures to be
carried through Parliament, for that would be helping them to govern
us.(p.540)
Thompson next discusses the anarchist influence that Morris was coming
under in the increasingly alienated Socialist League:
After the [Third] Annual [Socialist
League] Conference [of 1887] he made a more serious attempt to argue his case,
and to present an alternative to parliamentary action, in a new lecture; 'The
policy of Abstention', first delivered at Hammersmith at the end of July, 1887,
and afterwards read to private meetings of Socialists in several places. In
this he sought to characterize two possible Socialist policies – the policy of
parliamentary action, and that of abstention. Advocates of the first, he said,
‘believed in what may be called a system of cumulative reforms . . . carried
out by means of Parliament and a bourgeois executive'. They hope to elect
sufficient Socialists to Parliament to transform it from 'a mere instrument in
the hands of the monopolizes of the means of
production, into a body which should destroy monopoly'. The policy of
abstention he characterized in greater detail:
'This plan is founded on the necessity of
making the class-struggle clear to the workers, of pointing out to them that
while monopoly exists they can only exist as its slaves: so that Parliament and
all other institutions at present existing are maintained for the purpose of
upholding this slavery; that their wages are but slaves’ rations, and if they
were increased tenfold would be nothing more: that while the bourgeois rule lasts
they can indeed take part in it, but only on the terms that ye shall do nothing
to attack the grand edifice of which their slavery is the foundation. Nay more
than that: that they are asked to vote and send representatives to Parliament
(if ‘working-men’ so much the better) that they may point out what concessions
may be necessary for the ruling class to make in order that the slavery of the
workers may last on: in a word that to vote for the continuance of their own
slavery is all the parliamentary action that they will be allowed to take under
the present régime: Liberal Associations, Radical clubs, working men members
are at present, and socialists members will be in the future, looked on with
complacency by the government classes as serving towards the end of propping
the stability of robber society in the safest and least troublesome manner by
beguiling them to take part in their own government. A great invention, and
well worthy of the reputation of the Briton for practicality – and swindling!
How much better than the coarse old-world iron repression of that blunderer Bismark (sic). . . .'(p.541)
“The Policy of Abstention,” Morris continued,“is founded on this view”:
'That the interests of the two classes,
the workers and the capitalists are irreconcilable, and as long as the
capitalists exist as a class, they having the monopoly of the means of
production, have all the power of ordered and legal society; but on the other
hand that the use of this power is to keep down a wronged population, which
feels itself wronged, and is organizing for illegal resistance . . . would
impose such a burden on the governing classes as they will not be able to bear;
and they must finally break down under it, and take one of two courses, either
of them the birth of fear acting on the instinct to prolong and sustain their
life which is essential in all organisms. One course would be to try the effect
of wholesale concessions . . . and this course would be almost certain to have
a partial success; but I feel sure not so great a success sin delaying
revolution as it would have if taken with the expressed agreement of Socialist
representatives in Parliament: in the latter case the concessions would be
looked upon as a victory; whereas if they were the work of a hated government
from which the people were standing aloof, they would be dreaded as a bait, and
scorned as the last resource of a tyranny growing helpless. The other course .
. . would be stern repression . . . of the opinion and aspirations of the
working classes as a whole: for in England at least there would be no attempt
to adopt this course until opinion was so grown and so organized that the
danger to monopoly seemed imminent. In short the two courses are fraud and
force, and doubtless in a commercial country like this the resources of fraud
would be exhausted before the ruling class betook itself to open force'.(p.541-542)
Thompson elaborates on Morris’ position in 1887: “Supposing the policy of abstention were adopted, what did it imply in
immediate tactics?”
First,
the preaching of the principles of Socialism as widely as possible. But,
since a time comes ‘in such a movement as ours when it is ready to change from
a mere intellectual movement into a movement of action’ (and Morris thought
that this time had not yet arrived), it was necessary to consider what forms of
action would effect the Revolution. ‘The real
business of us propagandists’, Morris suggested, ‘is to instill this aim of the
workers becoming the masters of their own destinies, their own lives’. Once
this was done, the workers should be organized through trade unions in ‘a vast labour organization – the federation according to their
crafts . . . of all the workmen who have awoke to the
fact that they are the slaves of monopoly’. The one overriding aim of these
unions should be the overthrow of capitalism, and the establishment of
Socialism.
'Everything
that tends to mask
that opposition, to confuse it, weakens the popular force and
gives a new lease on life to the reaction . . . . If our own people are forming
part of parliament, the instruments of the enemy, they are helping to make the
very laws we will not obey. Where is the enemy then? What are we to do to
attack him? The enemy is a principle, you say: true, but the principle must be
embodied; and how can it be better embodied than in that assembly delegated by
the owners of monopoly to defend monopoly at all points? To smooth away the
difficulties of the monopolists even at the expense of apparent sacrifice of
their interests ‘to the amelioration of the lot of the working classes’? in
short to detach a portion of the people from the people’s side, to have it in
their midst helpless, dazed, wearied with ceaseless compromise, or certain
defeat, and yet to put it before the world as the advanced guard of the
revolutionary party, the representative of all that is active or practical of
the popular party'?
Morris suggested,
according to Thompson, that “the policy of abstention, might be supplemented .
. . by creating a truly popular centre outside Parliament (‘call it the labour parliament if you will’), deliberating at the same
time, and whose decrees will be obeyed by the people ‘and not those of the
Westminster Committee’. Its weapons of enforcement would be those of the
strike, co-operation, and the boycott: above all, it would be continually
educating the people in the administration of their own affairs. The plan of
parliamentary action, by contrast, he prophesied would develop along the
following lines:”
'Starting
from the same point as the abstentionists they have
to preach an electioneering campaign as an absolute necessity, and to set about
it as soon as possible: they will then have to put forward a program of reforms
deduced from the principle of Socialism . . . they will necessarily have to
appeal for support (i.e. votes) to a great number of people who are not
convinced Socialists, and their program of reforms will be the bait to catch
these votes: and to the ordinary voter it will be this bait which will be the
matter of interest, and not the principle. . . . So that . . . the Socialist
members when they get into Parliament will represent a heterogeneous body of
opinion, ultra-radical, democratic, discontented un-politicals,
rather than a body of Socialists; and it will be their opinions and prejudices
that will sway the actions of the members in Parliament. With these fetters on
them the Socialist members will have to act, and whatever they propose will
have to be a mere matter of compromise: yet even those measures they will not
carry: because long before their party gets powerful enough to form even a
formidable group for alliance with other parties, one section or other of
ordinary politicians will dish them, and will carry measures that will pass
current for being the very thing the Socialists have been asking for; because
once get Socialist M.Ps., and to ordinary public they will be the
representatives of the only Socialists. . . . So it will go on till either the
Socialist party in Parliament disappears into the advanced Democratic party, or
until they look round and find that they, still Socialists, have done nothing
but give various opportunities to the reactionists
for widening the basis of monopoly by creating a fresh middle-class under the
present one, and so staving off the day of the great change. And when they
become conscious of that . . . what can they do but begin all over again, and
try to form the two camps, each of them conscious of their true position of
being the one monopolists, and the other the slaves of monopoly'.(pp.543 -544)
This was Morris’s
contribution during his “anti-parliamentary” period; he repeated them different ways hundreds of time and did not
substantially modify them until 1891-1892. Nevertheless, he did successfully
disassociate himself from the Anarchist faction within the Socialist League.
While in practice the Anarchists could associate with the “abstentionist”
policy he was advocating, Morris based his argument on his understanding of the
class struggle and the class-character of the State. Thompson concludes:
His differences with the ‘parliamentary’ section of
the League were on questions of taqctics rather than
general theory, and his errors were derived from his feeling that the bourgeois
myth of parliamentary democracy had taken on its most insidious and hypocriticaql forms in Britain. . . . The target for his
attack throughout was Reformism, and it was his prophetic vision of the vista
of compromise and
careerism ahead which led him to over-balance in the opposite direction. Already
in September, 1887, he was identifying his real theoretical opponents as being among the Fabians, and this despite the fact
that Shaw was a close personal friend.(p.544-545)
Thompson concludes his
chapter on this period of Morris’s life spent animating the Socialist League
with the summary observation:
For five years William
Morris had been in the very forefront of the Socialist propaganda in England –
setting the fire aflame in new centers, patiently explaining this or that point
of theory, encouraging the doubters, putting himself in the van of scores of
actions, bringing his own special qualities of vision and enthusiasm to the new
movement, spending his own energies without thought. The last two years, in
particular, had seen an unending series of committees, lectures, articles and
editorial work, open-air meetings and correspondence, which he had undertaken
without complaint. Was it all to end in a faction-fight within his own party,
and alongside it the birth of an new movement,
Socialist in name but Radical and opportunist in reality? Whatever he may have
said, by way of encouragement to his comrades, by the summer of 1888 Morris
knew that somehow he and the pioneers had failed in their aim of building a
revolutionary party. And from that time onward he looked increasingly across
the intervening years to the future in which he never lost confidence.(p.600)
Reading this chapter of
the life of William Morris, I was reminded of my own interests in grassroots
organizing which stemmed from my graduate sschool
days studying social history at The University of Wisconsin, beginning in the
fall of 1968. In my final years of teaching American Studies at The University
of Grenoble, I organized a series of conferences on the history and strategies
of community organizing. A few examples of this work are below:
"The
Art and Science of Community Organizing"
Conferences 1, 2 & 3 – 2012 & 2013
Statement
of Motivation for the Conference Series on "Community Organizing."
A. Conference #1 : (11-14 octobre 2012) « Festival pour repenser la société », Université de Grenoble, Salle Berlioz.
B. Films of Conference #2 roundtable discussions, published by chris Thorpe on December 29, 2012 :
1) Discussions
at Round Table 1 : http://youtu.be/1vhHMHouwec
2) Discussions
at Round Table 2 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe7MAn_VbTM
3) Discussions
at Round Table 3 : http://youtu.be/WHCePuN1fbA
C. Conference
#3 : (12-13 avril 2013) « Community organizing : la
théorie et la pratique/Community Organizing/The Theory and The Practce », à
la café-librairie ANTIGONE en Grenoble.
1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZC4cOf8oLDk
2) https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=francis+feeley+organisation+de+collectivites
I also
conducted a series of public classes (called University without
Walls) in March 2009 on the public tramway with my
university students at the end of the work day, when the local high schools
were also dismissing students for the day. Projects such as these carried on a
collective tradition, the results of which are by no means obvious . . . .
1) 1ère
PARTIE DU COURS ALTERNATIF DANS DES TRAMS DE GRENOBLE
2) 2ème PARTIE DU COURS ALTERNATIF
DANS DES TRAMS DE GRENOBLE
3) 3ème PARTIE DU COURS ALTERNATIF
DANS DES TRAMS DE GRENOBLE
Meetings such
as these filled the last years of my teaching career; they were certainly in
the anti-authoritarian spirit of William Morris. It was a search to free
ourselves today from the tyranny of algorithms and “Artificial Intelligence”
and an effort to enter into sentient reality with the intention of pursuing an
uninhibited collective inquiry into the constraints that are imposed upon all
of us by the capitalist political economy. From a historical perspective, this
struggle against class domination and at times against its mystifying cultural
hegemony was a necessary preliminary pedagogical exercise to enable us to learn
the patterns of domination that limited our capacity to think clearly about the
world around us and the role we wished to play in our lifetime.
__________
NOTE:
*Mrs. Grundy, a fictional
English character who typifies the censorship enacted in everyday life by
conventional opinion. She first appears (but never onstage) in Thomas Morton’s
play Speed the Plough (produced 1798), in which one character, Dame Ashfield, continually worries about what her neighbour Mrs. Grundy will say of each development. Since
then the term Mrs. Grundy has passed into everyday speech as a criterion of
rigid respectability, especially in contexts in which
free expression is impeded by excessive purity.
The 24 items below will serve to remind readers
that a Philistine is one who wakes up in the morning without a yesterday and a
tomorrow - with no knowledge of history to encumber him, and no chain of “cause
and effect” to distract his thinking. He is “free” in the most
un-self-conscious way to plunder present opportunities, regardless of the
consequences, which, if acknowledged at all, he simply shrugs off as
“collateral damage.” To escape this impoverished existence, we must evolve out
of it with practice and come to understand that: The
sketch is to the painting what the painting is to the Landscape; that sentient
reality should be the object of our thoughts and contemplations, and not the
sterile abstractions that more or less govern the minds of our capitalist
rulers who seek "to create the world in their own image."
Sincerely,
Francis
Feeley
Professor
emeritus of American Studies
University
Grenoble-Alpes
Director of
Research
University of
Paris-Nanterre
Center for
the Advanced Study of American Institutions and Social Movements
The
University of California-San Diego
Bob Dylan
Published time: 17 Sep, 2018 22:42
Russian military
plane with 14 on board disappears during Israeli strikes on Latakia
https://www.rt.com/news/438673-russian-il20-disappears-radars/
A Russian
military Il-20 aircraft with 14 service members on board went off the radar
during an attack by four Israeli jets on Syria’s Latakia
province, the Russian Defense Ministry said. Air traffic controllers at Khmeimim Airbase “lost contact” with the aircraft
on Monday evening, during an attack by Israeli F-16 fighters on Latakia,
said the MoD. The plane was 35km off the coast
of Syria when it vanished.
&
Published time: 17 Sep, 2018 22:56
Russia detects
missile launches from French frigate off Syria’s coast in Mediterranean
https://www.rt.com/news/438676-french-frigate-mediterranean-missiles/
&
Published time: 18 Sep, 2018 07:43
Russian Il-20
downed by Syrian missile after Israeli F-16s used it as cover during attack – MoD
https://www.rt.com/news/438686-syria-russia-s200-il20/
Published time: 18 Sep, 2018 08:53
Russia to
Israel: ‘You are to blame for downing of Il-20 and death of crew’
https://www.rt.com/news/438690-russia-israel-il20-blame/
&
Published time: 18 Sep, 2018 11:40
Israeli army
blames Damascus for Russia’s Il-20 downing, mourns death of crew – statement
https://www.rt.com/news/438712-idf-statement-il20-downing/
&
On the Air: 18 Sept.2018
Human Shields : The ‘Palestinianization’
of Russians
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/09/israel-rejects-responsibility-downing-russian-aircraft-180918130621740.html
Russia formally complained to Israel about its air
raid on Monday, which led to the downing of a Russian Il-20 plane off Syria
coast. Russia laid the blame for the loss of live “squarely on the Israeli
side”.
Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu
spoke to his Israeli counterpart Avigdor Lieberman on
the phone about the downing of the Russian Il-20 plane on Monday night. He
relayed Moscow’s position on the incident, which blames the Israeli military
for setting up the Russian plane to be shot down by Syrian air defenses
responding to an Israeli air raid, an official statement from the Russian
military said.
&
Published
time: 19 Sep, 2018 10:50
Putin seeks to defuse
Israel crisis after downing of Russian jet
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/09/israel-rejects-responsibility-downing-russian-aircraft-180918130621740.html
Russian
leader conciliatory as officials blame 'hostile' Israeli actions after Syrian
forces mistakenly shoot down jet.
&
September 19, 2018
Russian
Response Options to the Latest Israeli Provocation
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50292.htm
by The Saker
Over the past 24 hours the Internet, including this blog, have been flooded with opinion on what everybody and anybody would do if they were in Putin’s boots. Proposals range from declaring an no-fly zone over Syria to, I kid you not, send a couple of Russian SSBNs (subs which carry intercontinental ballistic missiles) off the coast of Israel. Furthermore, since Putin has failed, at least so far, to implement any retaliatory measures, the usual chorus of “Putin is a traitor” has been swamping my poor mods with sanguine expressions of disgust about Putin, Russia and yours truly :-)
I do realize that nothing I say would change the minds of this latter group, but for the rest of us in the real world, a short reality check might be helpful. So, here it is a a short bullet-point format.
- Putin is absolutely right to take his time and not announce any immediate measures. Not only is this region of our planet extremely dangerous, he also needs the inputs of all the experts. In Russian we say that “haste is only needed when catching fleas”.
- Furthermore, there *are* questions which need to be investigated. For example, the Russians have declared that the Russian air defenses and the Syrian ones have now been integrated. Most people don’t realize that an S-200 battery does not just fire by itself or by the decision of the crew. At the very least, this decision is taken by a air defense command post which evaluates the threats and allocates targets. There is a high probability that Russians were also involved in the chain of events which lead to the downing of the Il-20.
- Declaring a no-fly zone over all of Syria is simply not in the current Russian capabilities. Like it or not, that is a fact. However, declaring an air exclusion zone over Khmeimim and Tartus is something the Russians could do, especially with the help of the Russian Navy ships near the Syrian coast and the Russian AWACS in the air (putting a pair of MiG-31BMs on combat air patrol over northern Syria would also be an option). The size of such an air exclusion zone over Russian forces would have to be very carefully agreed upon with all the relevant experts and lawyers (yes, Russia does care about international law).
So let’s not speculate about all this and wait for the Kremlin to take some kind of decision. Then we can evaluate it. Right now all these speculations are just a waste of time . . . .
Can Russia Survive Her “Partnerships”? Has Putin Made A Strategic Miscalculation?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50296.htm
by Paul Craig Roberts
In an act of intentional deception, Israel used a Russian airplane to cloak an Israeli attack on a Syrian ground position, with the consequence that Syrian air defense missiles downed the Russian airplane with the lost of 15 Russian military lives.
In the words of the Russian Ministry of Defense: “The Israeli pilots used the Russian plane as cover and set it up to be targeted by the Syrian air defense forces. As a consequence, the Il-20, which has radar cross-section much larger than the [Israeli] F-16, was shot down by an S-200 system missile.” Russian Defense Minister Shoigu said: “The blame for the downing of the Russian plane and the deaths of its crew members lies squarely on the Israeli side. The actions of the Israeli military were not in keeping with the spirit of the Russian-Israeli partnership, so we reserve the right to respond.” https://russia-insider.com/en/russian-military-says-holds-israel-responsible-deaths-15-servicemen-reserves-right-respond/ri24780 See also: http://tass.com/defense/1022123
For a few minutes it looked like Israel was finally to be held accountable for its reckless and irresponsible actions, but it was not to be. Russian President Putin contradicted his Defense Minister by declaring the loss of Russian lives to be “accidental,” a result of a “chain of tragic circumstances.”
One wonders how Israel does it. President Putin covered up for Israel’s destruction of the Russian IL-20 just as President Johnson covered up for Israel’s murderous attack on the USS Liberty that resulted in 208 US Navy casualties. https://www.rt.com/news/438728-putin-israel-syria-plane/ As Israel gets away with everything, including routine massacres of unarmed Palestinian women and children, there is no reason to expect Israel to change its behavior.
===========
b.
Money: The
Great Corrupter - David Harvey
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeBrBpEaDNI&feature=youtu.be
Is the
economy recovering, or is the system itself the problem? Economist
and philosopher David Harvey on money; which he calls "the great
corrupter". Professor David Harvey is one of the world’s leading
Marxist thinkers and most prolific writers on class warfare, capitalism, crisis
and how we find our way out. Harvey has also coined key social movement
concepts, such as the idea of "the right to the city". His latest
book is Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. Also on the show: a
look at a meeting of movements as activists from Black Lives Matter travel to
Palestine.
===========
c.
The Rise of
Finance and the Fall of American Business – RAI with Rana Foroohar (1/6)
https://therealnews.com/stories/rise-finance-fall-american-business
with Paul Jay
On Reality
Asserts Itself, Ms. Foroohar says financialization
delivers stagnant wages, inequality and economic crisis; the Financial Times
columnist and author of “Makers and Takers” says the financial sector
represents only 7 percent of the U.S. economy, but takes around 25 percent of
all corporate profit while creating only 4 percent of all jobs.
===========
d.
Democracy
Now!
“Climate
Capitalism is Killing Our Communities”: Protesters
Disrupt Gov. Brown’s SF Climate Summit
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/9/14/climate_capitalism_is_killing_our_communities
As California
Governor Jerry Brown’s Global Climate Action Summit kicked off Thursday,
indigenous and climate justice activists blocked the main entrance in protest.
While the protests took place outside the GCAS, Gov. Brown
and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the U.N. special envoy for climate
action, were inside. Protesters disrupted Bloomberg’s speech at the summit’s
main plenary. Democracy Now! was there, in the streets
and at the conference.
===========
e.
The Black
Agenda Report
An Interview With Boots Riley: “In the World of Film,
We’ve Edited out All Rebellion”
https://blackagendareport.com/interview-boots-riley-world-film-weve-edited-out-all-rebellion
by Chip Gibbons and Boots Riley
+
“Anonymous”
Shows Split in Ruling Class
https://blackagendareport.com/anonymous-shows-split-ruling-class-0
Black Agenda
Radio with Nellie Bailey and Glen Ford
The “Anonymous”
article in the New York Times is more evidence of “a real split in the upper
levels of the US ruling elite,” said Dr Gerald
Horne, professor of history and African American Studies at the University of
Houston. “I can’t say that I’m that upset that they’re squabbling,” said Horne.
“Maybe, if they’re fighting each other, they’ll have less time and energy to
fight us.”
===========
f.
Erdogan, Putin to hold talks in Sochi over Idlib
situation
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/09/erdogan-putin-hold-talks-sochi-idlib-situation-180917071626306.html
===========
g.
Home Video articulation
September
2018
HOLDING A
WEEKLY VIGILE PROTESTING “MURDER INCORPORATED” AT ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN
Who Conflates
Zionism and Judaism?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XzcdNEb4qw&feature=youtu.be
by Gilad Atzman
(Published on
Sep 16, 2018)
Every Sabbath
the good people of Ann Arbor protest against their local synagogue. They have
been doing it for 15 years.
+
Censored
Documentary Exposes Israel’s Attack on Black Lives Matter
https://blackagendareport.com/censored-documentary-exposes-israels-attack-black-lives-matter
Max
Blumenthal
“Israeli’s
boasted that they were taking decisive measures to drive a wedge between
established black community leadership and the new generation gravitating
towards Black Lives Matter.”
Israeli
operatives and their US lobbyists sprang into action when the Movement for
Black Lives came out in support of the boycott Israel movement.
Exclusive footage from the censored Al Jazeera documentary, “The Lobby – USA,” shows Israeli
government officials taking credit for attacks on Black Lives Matter and
reveals an Israel lobbyist explaining how his organization shut down a BLM
fundraiser
When the Movement for Black Lives released a platform in August 2016 that
supported the BDS (boycott, divestment
and sanctions) movement and identified Israel as an apartheid state engaged in
a project of genocide against Palestinians, the Israeli government snapped into
action.
===========
h.
On the Censorship of Michael Hoffman's Books by Amazon
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50261.htm
The Saker
A couple of
months ago I did an interview with one of the
foremost scholars of rabbinical Judaism, Michael Hoffman. The
occasion was the release of his latest book “The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome”. At the time I did not expect to
have to ask for a follow-up interview with him, but when I learned that Amazon
had censored his books (please see Hoffman’s own account of this
here). Specifically, the ban is on three of his books. A
complete ban (Kindle + printed book) on Judaism’s
Strange Gods: Revised and Expanded, as well as The Great Holocaust Trial: Revised and
Expanded, while his textbook, Judaism
Discovered, has been removed from the Kindle. I felt that I had to talk
to him again and he kindly agreed to reply to my questions. I submit to you the
full text of our Q&A which I will follow-up with a short commentary.
===========
i.
September 11,
2018
Artificial
Stupidity
https://thebulletin.org/2018/09/artificial-stupidity/
by Thomas Gaulkin,
I learned a
few things from reading an excerpt from Yuval Noah Harari’s
book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century,
published in the October issue of The
Atlantic. One is that it took a Google machine-learning
program just four hours to teach itself and master chess, once the pinnacle of
centuries of human intellectual effort, easily defeating the top-ranked
computer chess engine in the world.
Another is
that artificial intelligence systems may be inherently anti-democratic and
anti-human. New heights of computing power and data processing make it more
efficient to centralize systems in authoritarian governments, Harari says, and will render humans increasingly
irrelevant. “By 2050,” he writes, “a useless class might emerge, the result not
only of a shortage of jobs or a lack of relevant education but also of
insufficient mental stamina to continue learning new skills.”
In other
words, we might just be too dumb to keep up.
Harari thinks we can avoid the worst outcomes by encouraging
decentralization of data and continuing to work on our own intelligence as much
as we do on the artificial kind. “If we invest too much in AI and too
little in developing the human mind, the very sophisticated artificial intelligence of computers might serve only to
empower the natural stupidity of humans, and to nurture our worst (but also,
perhaps, most powerful) impulses.”
===========
j.
From: "IAK Blog" <contact@ifamericansknew.org>
Sent:
Thursday, 13 September, 2018
Subject: IAK Billboard placed in Ohio, Palestine aid cuts, unarmed boys killed...
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k.
Censored Film
Reveals The Israel Project’s Secret Facebook Campaign
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50253.htm
by Ali Abunimah and Asa Winstanley
===========
l.
Gaza Children
Cinema
We are currently organising
our efforts with our partner in Gaza, Palestine to launch the new phase of Gaza
Children Cinema’s activities.
We are also
preparing for Small moments of beauty + truth: Art inspired by the children of
Gaza <https://gazachildrencinema.org/blog/small-moments-of-beauty-and-truth>
exhibition and auction (18-22 September 2018), the event is
supported byThe City of Hobart, Australia to raise
money and awareness of Gaza Children’s Cinema
Please feel
free to share ERAP ideas and ways of collaboration.
Merci bien
encours pour le soutien et la solidarité,
Kind
Regards,
Ayman Qwaider for Gaza Children Cinema.
___________
Gaza Children
Cinema website <https://gazachildrencinema.org>
| Facebook <https://www.facebook.com/GazaChildrenCinema/>
| Twitter <https://twitter.com/gazacinema?lang=en>
| Instagram <https://www.instagram.com/gazachildrencinema/>
| Donate <https://www.gofundme.com/GazaChildrenCinema2018-2019>
============================================
*Upcoming
Gaza Children Cinema event:
Small moments
of beauty + truth: Art inspired by the children of Gaza <https://gazachildrencinema.org/blog/small-moments-of-beauty-and-truth>
(18-22
September 2018)
An exhibition
and auction supported byThe
City of Hobart to raise money and awareness of Gaza Children’s Cinema
*Gaza
Children Cinema in media:
Gaza
Children’s Cinema – film-inspired learning <https://www.eenet.org.uk/gaza-childrens-cinema-film-inspired-learning/>
CINEMA
SALVATION
<https://heraldonlinejournal.com/2016/11/04/cinema-salvation/>
ESCAPING WAR
AND WEAVING MAGIC: THE GAZA CHILDREN’S CINEMA <https://grokonline.com.au/2017/10/28/escaping-war-and-weaving-magic-the-gaza-childrens-cinema/>
British Film
and Theater Figures Condemn Israeli Bombing of Major Gaza Cultural Center <https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/british-film-theater-figures-condemn-israeli-bombing-major-gaza-cultural-center-1136297>
===========
m.
America is
Looking More and More Like Pinochet’s
Chile
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/09/13/america-is-looking-more-and-more-like-pinochets-chile/
by Ariel Dorfman
===========
n.
9/11 Legacy:
Two Contending Fascisms
https://blackagendareport.com/911-legacy-two-contending-fascisms
by Glen Ford
“The
Clinton-Pelosi fascists invite Black people to fully participate in their own
destruction -- and to feel honored at the invitation.”
Two fascisms
compete for popular support in the US. One is blatantly racist,
the other offers a devil’s bargain that demands Black people accept austerity
and war. Both must be fought. 9/11 gave the rulers of the United States blanket
permission to wage foreign wars at will or whim, while stripping down domestic
civil liberties to fit the security demands of a perpetual war society. At the
time, voices on the left warned of impending fascism -- and they were right,
although many of these same people have since acclimated to the new order, and
now scream “fascist” at the racist menace in the White House. And they are
right, again -- but only halfway.
Two
contending, yet interrelated, forms of fascism are vying for supremacy in the
U.S. Both fascisms are anchored in the leadership of their respective duopoly
parties, which together monopolize the national political conversation. Thus,
fascism is “mainstream” politics in the United States, as reflected in the
daily diatribes between the warmongering, Russian stooge-hunting, neo-McCarthyite, corporate Democratic “Resistance” and the
race-mongering, Dixiecrat-Republican, law and
order-loving (but also white mob rule-friendly) troglodytes aligned with Donald
Trump.
“Fascism is
“mainstream” politics in the United States.”
These are not
polar opposite fascisms, of course. Both are American exceptionalist -- another term for imperialist -- and both
are thoroughly capitalist, tailored to the rule of the rich. The major
difference between the two, is race.
===========
o.
Charges
'Without Merit' - Jeremy Corbyn, Antisemitism,
Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50247.htm
by Media Lens
===========
p.
Special
Report: Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour
Party's Radical Rise
http://www.lauraflanders.org/?video=M-uAdOrFv48
What difference does a Party make? This week on the Laura
Flanders Show, we talk about what's happening in the UK where one of the two
main parties is picking up many of the radical demands coming out of movement
groups seeking to transform the economy and society. In 2017, mainstream media
predicted that the Labour Party
would be crushed in the general election. Instead, it won its best
result in 20 years, getting more than 40% of the vote under the leadership of life long socialist and anti-war campaigner Jeremy Corbyn. Although he didn't become prime minister, Corbyn did come close to unseating Theresa May . . . .
===========
q.
An Open
Letter to ‘Socialists’ Who Might be Fronting for the Democratic Party
https://blackagendareport.com/open-letter-socialists-who-might-be-fronting-democratic-party
Any socialist
who thought, as I did, that Ocasio-Cortez would
be our socialist champion should watch the entire 27-minute PBS Firing Line interview to get a sense
of just how bad this train wreck might be.
“In the long
term, will focusing on running ‘socialist’ candidates within the Democratic
Party impede building an independent socialist movement and organization?”
First, a confession. When I learned of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s primary victory against incumbent dinosaur
Joe Crowley, I was, as embarrassing as it is to admit, moved to tears. I’m the
emotional type, take after my mom. I’m also a Xicanx,
a life-long socialist, and was overwhelmed to see a young brown woman step up
and raise the socialist banner. Now, however, as weeks have passed since her
primary victory, as she has made the rounds of the talk show circuit, been
feted by progressive circles, interviewed by corporate and “Left” media, and shilled for Democratic Party candidates, she has said
enough (and sometimes more disturbingly not said enough) to make one wonder if
she’s making up this whole socialism thing as she goes along.
A further confession. I donated to her campaign. So I
receive emails and will share her message, the same message she articulated at
the recent Democratic Party love fest, NetRoots
Nation.
“One wonder if she’s making up this whole socialism thing as she
goes along.”
Ocasio-Cortez reassures us that she wants to bring back the
Democratic Party of old. Okay, maybe not the Democratic Party of slavery, but
you know what I mean, the real Democratic Party. The Democratic Party of the New Deal and
FDR, of the Great Society, the War on Poverty and Lyndon B. Johnson (and Dr.
King too because we all know how much the Democratic Party and LBJ loved Dr.
King). Yeah, that Democratic
Party. Ocasio-Cortez wants us to “come home.”
Along with her ‘socialism’ message, it is hard to tell If she is also making
this up by herself, or if she is receiving tutelage from someone in the
Democratic Party’s Fairytale & Children’s Section.Ocasio-Cortez
is messaging the Blue version of “Make America Great Again.”
===========
r.
The New York
Times
September 16, 2018
The Next
Financial Calamity Is
Coming. Here’s What to
Watch.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/12/business/the-next-recession-financial-crisis.html
by MATT PHILLIPS and KARL RUSSELL
A decade ago this week, Wall Street imploded. Read our special coverage
The global
financial crisis is fading into history. But the roots of the next one might
already be taking hold.
Financial
crises strike rich countries every 28 years on average. Often, the break
between busts is much shorter.
Fast-growing
pockets of debt, as in the last time around, look like potential sources of
problems. They’re nowhere near as big as the mortgage bubble, and no blow-ups
appear imminent.
“But what we
saw last time around is that things can creep up on you,” said Wesley Phoa, a bond-fund manager at the Capital Group. “You can
turn around and in three years’ time you can go from not much of a problem to a
pretty big problem.”
Students are
borrowing at record levels
===========
s.
September 14,
2018
A virtual visit to a nuclear test site
https://thebulletin.org/2018/09/a-virtual-visit-to-a-nuclear-test-site/
by Thomas Gaulkin
It can be
difficult to grasp how nuclear weapons shape world events without confronting
the cold, hard facts. There are an estimated 15,000 nuclear warheads on Earth,
and the nine nuclear states that have them ran some 2,000 nuclear tests to
produce them. Sky-high numbers like that get you part of the way.
But to get a
sense of the human side of things, it helps to be closer to the ground. Not
easy when you’re talking about nuclear bombs, but an impressively immersive
website launched this week offers a virtual shortcut. Nuclear Dissent presents an
intimate, if narrow, history of France’s nuclear
testing in the South Pacific and the ultimately successful attempts to stop
them.
Up until the 1990s, France performed nearly 200
nuclear tests on the French Polynesian atoll of Mururoa,
about 750 miles from Tahiti. Protests by local activists and members of
Greenpeace (which, in one of its earliest campaigns, stationed sailboats within
the 12-mile exclusion zone around the test site) led New Zealand and Australia
to bring a case against France to the World Court, and atmospheric detonations
were halted in 1974. But they went underground and exploded another
150-odd devices beneath the water before finally quitting under intense
local and international pressure in 1996—the same year they signed the Comprehensive
Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty.
Designed to work with virtual reality devices as well
as standard web browsers, Nuclear Dissent presents
this history in five “chapters,” each in turn organized around three parts: a
traditional video documentary segment, an interactive 3D environment, and a
photo gallery, some with archival audio recordings. The first three chapters center on the accounts of two Polynesian men who
worked on the atoll and two Greenpeace activists who were instrumental in
sparking international condemnation of the tests. Multiple standoffs shape
the history, from the 1970s sail-ins to the bombing of Greenpeace’s
Rainbow Warrior boat by French spies in 1985, and riots in 1995 that
precipitated the end of testing.
The final two chapters take up ongoing environmental
and health problems caused by the tests (such as the potential collapse of the
atoll, and lingering effects of radiation as far away as Tahiti), along with expert
commentary on the persistent danger posed by nuclear weapons worldwide—ending
with a tidy version of Alex Wellerstein’s NukeMap and a reminder of the current time).
+
Nuclear Dissent: An interactive
VR documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AP_ff4mfSRk
===========
t.
Science
& Environment
New El Niño
weather event likely this winter says WMO
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45471409
by Matt
McGrath, Environment correspondent
===========
u.
Speculation over fate of
missing Dutchman linked to WikiLeaks
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/sep/14/speculation-over-fate-of-missing-dutchman-linked-to-wikileaks
Arjen Kamphuis’ effects found in the sea but his phones were turned on 1,000 miles away
===========
v.
The U.S. Goes
to War Against the ICC to Cover Up Alleged War Crimes
in Afghanistan
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/50266.htm
by Murtaza Hussain
Recent
statements from the Trump administration suggest that the United States is now
preparing to go to war against the ICC itself, motivated largely by an effort
to silence investigations into alleged American war crimes committed in
Afghanistan, as well as alleged crimes committed by Israel during the 2014 war
in the Gaza Strip. In a speech at a D.C. event held by the Federalist
Society on Monday, Donald Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton denounced the ICC
as “illegitimate” and expressed his intentions toward the institution in no
uncertain terms. “We will not cooperate with the ICC,” Bolton said. “We will
provide no assistance to the ICC. We will not join the ICC. We will let the ICC
die on its own. After all, for all intents and
purposes, the ICC is already dead to us.”
In addition to this death wish against the court, Bolton said that the United States would retaliate against any ICC investigations into U.S. activities by sanctioning the travel and finances of ICC officials, even threatening to prosecute them in American courts.
===========
w.
When Bernie
Sold Out His Hero, Anti-Authoritarians Paid
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/09/19/when-bernie-sold-out-his-hero-anti-authoritarians-paid/
by Bruce E. Levine
Bernie
Sanders, in his thirties, wrote and directed the documentary Eugene V. Debs: Trade Unionist, Socialist, Revolutionary (1979), and a
picture of Debs hangs on Sanders’s office wall.
But the arc of Sanders’s political career has moved in the opposite direction
from the arc of his hero. Debs moved from polite dissent to courageously
resisting illegitimate authority—landing him in prison and shortening his life.
In contrast, Sanders moved from polite dissent to overt obedience—de-energizing
anti-authoritarians.
Debs is one
of several anti-authoritarians who I profile in Resisting Illegitimate Authority, a book
about and for anti-authoritarians, many of whom have today been disillusioned
by Sanders serving as a sheepdog for the Democratic Party (herding those who
had fled from it back into it). Worse than other such sheepdogs, Sanders, from
his earliest years in politics, has attempted to seduce anti-authoritarians by
identifying with Debs but then, for career expediency, ignored what his hero’s
life taught him.
Debs, in his
twenties, was a successful Democratic politician but gradually became
radicalized by his experiences. In his late thirties, when jailed for leading
the Pullman Strike, it became clear to Debs that both the Republican and
Democratic Parties were owned by the ruling class. Debs moved from dissent to
disobedience—ultimately disobeying not only the Democratic Party but the U.S.
government.
===========
x.
As Blasey Ford Alleges Kavanaugh Assaulted Her, Will Senate Repeat Mistakes Made with Anita Hill?
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/9/17/dr_blasey_ford_alleges_kavanaugh_tried