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Where were you on 9/11 1973?
In the course of my career, I have met a number of people who have lived through unspeakable horrors. I have always realised that I had little to offer other than a willingness to listen, but of course, most people who have actually been in Hell are unwilling or unable to “talk about it”. They…
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Back to Palestine
While the war in Ukraine has engulfed most of our attention, the plight of Palestinians in Gaza, the occupied territories, and Jerusalem has grown dramatically worse. Almost every day, one or multiple Palestinians are killed. The paragraph I just wrote is no different from what you might read in any mainstream paper. What is missing…
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A brief look at gold mines
Gold mines are worth gold, and wars are fought for them, as we know. See, below, a famous photo of a gold mine. See more of Sebastião Salgado’s photos of the mine Serra Pelada. The above photo and the others on the same site are not from 1895 or even 1905 or 1925 or 1955.…
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Not liberty
Lets take a look at Haiti.(Cf. Thomas Piketty, Capitalism and Ideology, Chapter 6). Slavery was abolished for the first time in modern times, not in England, but in Haiti, and by former slaves. In 1780, there were 470,000 slaves in Haiti (90 % of the total population). They rebelled in 1791 and, not surprisingly, their…
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Discombobulation
Rhetorical skills are as important today as they were in ancient Rome, except that today, we don’t admit it. In general, in the relationship between those who hold power and the rest of us, there is much that is never admitted. Very much. Business management, for instance, is as much about honing rhetorical skills as…
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In the pursuit of (whose?) wealth
Tonight I raise my glass to Padre Gregorio Iriarte, although he is no longer with us. He passed away quietly on 11 October 2012, having miraculously managed to reach the age of 87. I say “miraculously”, because he was for many years pursued by the authorities as a dangerous public enemy, and several of his…
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Excerpt from a phone call
Interpellant: “… by the way, have you heard about the Greenwood massacre?” Other: “… the Green…?” I: “—wood. 1921” O: “Oh, yes, now I remember! Tulsa, wasn’t it. I saw a horrifying documentary about it about a year ago. Apparently, after the police’s cold-blooded killing of that guy, you know – ‘I can’t breathe” –…
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Excerpt
from Harold Pinter’s “Nobel Lecture” on his acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature, 2005 Source: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2005/pinter/lecture/ …. … that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true.…
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Slaughter
A few hours ago the Israeli military butchered a fifteen year old unarmed Palestinian. This is the 12th child on the West Bank killed by Israeli soldiers so far this year. On 13 August the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (UN Human Rights) (OHCHR), wrote: From the start of the year until…
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The contemptible little man
Here he is, General Min. It’s tempting to call him a monster, but we don’t really know, do we. Nobody seems to know much about him. Maybe he is his wife’s or his mother’s puppet; women can be as vile as men, you know, as greedy and as manipulative. Maybe he is the puppet of…