Donald Trump proclaimed "I Am A Nationalist." Last week Trump supporters attacked anti-racist protesters on the streets of New York. Yesterday's bombs were placed at the homes of former Presidents, African American and Jewish public figures.
Masterpiece or not, William S. Burroughs' "The Revised Boy Scout Manual": An Electronic Revolution fills a puzzling lacuna in the Beat author's bibliography, and offers an foretaste of the viperous Age of Trump.
The monument sheds light in an unprecedented and innovative way on the reasons and circumstances surrounding the death and torture of countless victims, including women and children, who suffered at the hands of vigilante mobs.
Since World War II Israel and its pre-state paramilitary organizations have assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world - some 2,300 "targeted killing operations," most of them against Palestinians, but also aimed at Egyptians, Syrians, Iranians and others. In the name of state security, Israeli officials didn't just walk the line of legality, they trampled it.
“The current American president is ignorant of the region,” said Hezbollah spokesman Mohammed Afif, speaking to reporters in a cave until recently occupied by Nusra. “We are the force that fights terrorism while the United States continues to support terrorism in many forms.”
The author argues that the Terror of the French Revolution was a price worth paying, and that the lessons from overthrowing the old regime should temper today's trend of maligning oppressed people's resort to violence as itself a rationale for ongoing class injustices. The reviewer, no critic of revolutionary struggle, argues that the author overemphasizes the pursuit of vengeance then and now involved at the expense of politics and a weighing of class forces.
The attack in Manchester was likely by Sunni radicals (ISIL has claimed it), and came two days after President Trump blamed all terrorism on Shiite Iran at a speech in Saudi Arabia, the proponent of a form of extreme Sunni supremacism. In 1996, Manchester had also been victimized by a bomb at a civillian center; in that instance left by the Provisional IRA. The question is: can anything be learned from looking at 1996 and 2017 in the same historical frame?
Rather than evaluate one’s own behavior in a bad situation, one tends to blame others and to disregard the constraints that others operate under. This is typically considered to be a “self-serving bias”. The character of the man of the West always surmounts the character of the man of the East. The violence of the West is prophylactic, while the violence of the East is destructive.
Variety: "The complex story of how McVeigh came to be the righteous and violent sociopath he was. He saw himself as a freedom fighter going to war against the evils of big government."
It's time to end US military engagements in the Middle East. Drones, special operations, CIA arms supplies, military advisers, aerial bombings - the whole nine yards. Over and done with. That might seem impossible in the face of ISIS, terrorism, Iranian ballistic missiles, and other US security interests, but a military withdrawal from the Middle East is by far the safest path for the United States and the region. That approach has instructive historical precedents.
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