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27 Sep 09

Obama's Big Silence: The Race Question | Naomi Klein

  • Americans began the summer still celebrating the dawn of a "post-racial" era. They are ending it under no such illusion.
  • Lost in the circus atmosphere was the enormous importance of the conference to people of African descent, and nowhere more so than among Obama's most loyal base. The US civil rights movement had embraced the first Durban conference, held in summer 2001, with great enthusiasm, viewing it as the start of the final stage of Martin Luther King's dream for full equality. Though most black leaders offered only timid public criticism of the president's Durban II boycott, the decision was discussed privately as his most explicit betrayal of the civil rights struggle since taking office.
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11 May 08

Advice for What the Next U.S. President Should Do About Iran

  • The
    only way to be sure of preventing Iran's acquiring a nuclear weapon
    capability is to reject those calling for military action--and
    to negotiate a comprehensive settlement of all outstanding
    disputes between Iran and the USA, such that both sides can resume
    normal relations on a basis of mutual respect at least, and friendship
    if possible.
  • after Baghdad fell to the coalition in spring 2003, the
    Iranian government sent the US (via the Swiss government) a proposal for
    talks toward a 'Grand Bargain' that promised resolution of the nuclear
    dispute, and de facto Iranian recognition of Israel. The Bush
    administration ignored the proposal, and rebuked the Swiss for passing
    it on.
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26 Dec 07

ATA : Public Access Mandate Made Law

  • President Bush has signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764), which includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide the public with open online access to findings from its funded research. This is the first time the U.S. government has mandated public access to research funded by a major agency.



    The provision directs the NIH to change its existing Public Access Policy, implemented as a voluntary measure in 2005, so that participation is required for agency-funded investigators. Researchers will now be required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central. Full texts of the articles will be publicly available and searchable online in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a journal.
11 Nov 07

Hebdo Blogs

  • Sarkozy a donc calculé qu’il était tout à fait improductif de poursuivre la politique étrangère de troisième voie qui avait été inaugurée en 1958 par le général de Gaulle.
02 Nov 07

The Armenian Resolution: Pure Grandstanding

  • No one can deny that hundreds of thousands of Armenians were killed: Western sources, and Armenian eyewitness survivors, attest to that fact.  But to this day no one has found the Ottoman “smoking gun” that proves, beyond the shadow of a doubt—and don’t we want a rather high bar of proof for something as serious as genocide?—that the authorities in Istanbul ordered the “deliberate and systematic destruction” of the Armenians in the eastern part of the Empire.
  • Steny Hoyer tried to reassure the Turks by telling them that this resolution is “not about your government.”  The Majority Leader, unlike some in the press,9 seems to realize that it was not the Turkish government that killed Armenians—it was the old Ottoman imperial one.  And one might reasonably wonder why the modern Turks  are so paranoid about claims  of  genocide being perpetrated by their predecessor regime.  However, that scimitar cuts  both ways: one might also ask why the Democrats in Congress are so eager to pass a meaningless, toothless resolution condemning a government that hasn’t existed for 85 years— in the process estranging us even further from one of our few close allies in the Muslim world—when the historical record fails to support their opportunistic legislation?

History News Network

  • Turkey has been the strongest ally that the United States has had in the Middle East since the end of WW II. The Marshall Plan started with Northern tier states like Turkey and Greece. Turkey joined NATO and was a key player in the American victory in the Cold War. As a secular government, Turkey stood against the rising tide of Muslim radicalism. To the extent that Turkey is moderating its long-term secular militancy, and moving toward fair elections, it may be providing a model for a moderate, democratic Middle East. Its economy is growing rapidly, foreign investment is in the billions. Turkey is in short, almost everything the US could have asked for in the Middle East.



    But the Bush administration has, during the past five years, increasingly thrown away this asset, and now is in danger of losing a close and valued ally altogether.

Americans are Tourists of History

  • Milan Kundera once famously wrote that “kitsch is the absolute denial of shit” and the primary aesthetic of totalitarian regimes, in which it facilitates a false sense of community and the idea of a universal “brotherhood of man.”  It is no coincidence that we have had an extraordinary embrace of kitsch in this country in the wake of 9/11 and coincident with the rise of broad censorship of political debate, the enactment of the USA Patriot Act and its broad restriction of civil rights, and the selling of a war of aggression to the American public on the false premise of national defense.  Thus, an American public can acquiesce to its government’s aggressive political and military policies when that public is constantly reassured by the comfort offered by kitsch patriotic objects, security consumerism, and the narrative that we are innocent and unknowing.  In the comforting world of kitsch and in our tourism of history, torture cannot exist. 

History News Network

  • racism is the reason the United States did not establish a European-style welfare system. He provides as an example of the dynamic what happened to Harry Truman's plan to create a system of national health insurance. Despite overwhelming public approval of the plan whites in the South torpedoed it out of fear that hospitals would be integrated.
  • America in the 1950s was a middle-class society, to a far greater extent than it had been in the 1920s--or than it is today. Social injustice remained pervasive: Segregation still ruled in the South, and both overt racism and overt discrimination against women were the norm throughout the country. Yet ordinary workers and their families had good reason to feel that they were sharing in the nation's prosperity as never before. And, on the other side, the rich were a lot less rich than they had been a generation earlier.
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20 Sep 07

U.S. Airport Screeners Are Watching What You Read

  • International travelers concerned about being labeled a terrorist or drug runner by secret Homeland Security algorithms may want to be careful what books they read on the plane. Newly revealed records show the government is storing such information for years.


    Privacy advocates obtained database records showing that the government routinely records the race of people pulled aside for extra screening as they enter the country, along with cursory answers given to U.S. border inspectors about their purpose in traveling. In one case, the records note Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Gilmore's choice of reading material, and worry over the number of small flashlights he'd packed for the trip.

18 Sep 07

It is the death of history - Independent Online Edition > Robert Fisk

24 Sep 06

MoorishGirl: Letter to America

  • We want the world to know that our rulers do not represent the Iranian people and that their religion is not the religion of the entire nation. We ask that in shaping its policies toward the Iranian regime, the United States not overlook the interests of Iranian civil society. In particular, we hope that America listens to those in Iran who fear that policies intended to contain the current crisis might in fact lead to a greater crisis, and to war.
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