Portside

May 15, 2016 marked the 100-year anniversary of the first U.S. military occupation of the Dominican Republic. Unlike other violent historical events in global history—from the European colonization of the Americas to the Holocaust to the Vietnam War—the U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic remains hidden from public memory and relegated to the footnotes of American history, even as Dominicans become one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in the United States.

The U.S. Supreme Court has voted 4-4 in one of the most consequential immigration cases in recent history, United States v. Texas. The High Court's failure to fall one way or another in the case leaves in place a lower court decision that blocks the Obama administration's deferred action immigration initiatives known as DAPA and the expansion of DACA from being implemented. An Atlanta coalition of local community organizations have launched an ICE Free Zones campaign.

With the American public's limited attention span for international affairs tied up by fears of ISIS (also known as Daesh), intractable wars in the Middle East and unease about Putin's Russia, Obama's much-touted Asia-Pacific pivot frequently gets third or fourth billing on the foreign policy marquee.

He was short in stature, elderly, frail, and couldn't hear particularly well, but what struck me most were his eyes. They were cloudy and rheumy, yes, but there was something else, something deep and troubled, beyond the merely physical, swirling inside them. His eyes were haunted.

This piece, the first of two parts, is excerpted from Noam Chomsky’s new book, Who Rules the World? (Metropolitan Books). Part 2 will be posted on May 10, 2016. Noam Chomsky is still writing with the same chilling eloquence about the updated war-on-terror version of this American nightmare. At a moment when the Vietnam bomber of choice, the B-52, is being sent back into action in the war against the Islamic State, Chomsky, too, is back in action.

In this exclusive interview, Prof Peter Kuznick speaks of: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagazaki; US crimes and lies behind the Vietnam war, and what was really behind that inhumane invasion; why the US engaged a Cold War with the Soviet Union, and how that war and the mainstream media influences the world today; the interests behind the assassinations of President Kennedy; US imperialism towards Latin America. . .the War on Terror and War on Drugs.

Nick Turse's award-winning book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam was a harrowing historical journey for which he traveled to small villages on the back roads of Vietnam to talk to those who had experienced horrific crimes decades earlier. In 2015, however, on his second trip to South Sudan, a country the U.S. helped bring into existence, he found himself in an almost unimaginable place where the same kinds of war crimes were being committed.

We don’t need the empire to give us anything. Our efforts will be legal and peaceful, because our commitment is to peace and fraternity among all human beings who live on this planet.