Impossible Debt?
1. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps…
Category: The War-making State
A Brief Consideration of Napalm
1. American Heritage Dictionary Napalm, incendiary material used in bombs and flame throwers. Developed during World War II, napalm is a mixture of gasoline (sometimes mixed with other petroleum fuels) and a thickening agent. The…
A Counter Friction To Stop the Machine
The case of Bradley Manning matters. The reason is simple: He touched a nerve. Before releasing over 250,000 diplomatic cables to Wikileaks, Manning commented, “Hilary Clinton, and several thousand diplomats around the world are going…
“We’re Proud to be St. Louis Grown”
I was just visiting with my friend Suzanne Renard at Park Avenue Coffee She told me that her relatives in France decry that she lives in “the most evil city in the world”–Saint Louis Evil…
Refusal (Muhammad Ali)
I came across the following when preparing tonight’s session of our reading circle of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (the chapters on the Black Freedom struggle and the Vietnam War). Why should…
Weekend Meditation
A recent conversation with Sharifa led me to look again at one of Said’s many penetrating studies… 1. In fact, there is no way that I know of apprehending the world from within American culture…
To Be Radical Is Habitually To Do Things Which Society at Large Despises
1. I have seen the victims. And this sight of the mutilated dead has exerted such inward change upon me That the words of corrupt diplomacy appear to me more and more in their true…
Manifest Destiny
1. And that claim [to Oregon] is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great…
“Agent Orange Has Given Me a Death Sentence”
Through information provided by Virgina, who works with Veterans for Peace, I have been examining more closely the on-going effect of Agent Orange and came across this recent testimony from the Guardian. Mark During the…
A Hard Rain: Afghanistan, St. Louis, and How to Make Peace
Join us for a round table discussion with Andrew Wimmer on his article, “A Hard Rain: Afghanistan, St. Louis, and How to Make Peace” (Karen House Round Table, Winter 2011) … Monday 28 February 2011…