Opinion

ANADA – Activists across Canada marked the third anniversary of the Yemen school bus massacre on Monday with protests at weapons manufacturers and government offices, calling on Canada to stop all weapons exports to Saudi Arabia. The Saudi bombing of a school bus in a crowded market in northern Yemen on August 9, 2018 killed 44 children and ten adults and wounded many more.

In Nova Scotia activists protested outside Lockheed Martin’s Dartmouth facility. The bomb used in the airstrike on the Yemeni school bus was made by weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin Canada is a wholly-owned subsidiary of U.S. company Lockheed Martin.

There is an ongoing, but hidden, Israeli war on the Palestinians which is rarely highlighted or even known. It is a water war, which has been in the making for decades. 

On July 26 and 27, two separate but intrinsically linked events took place in the Ein al-Hilweh area in the occupied Jordan Valley, and near the town of Beita, south of Nablus. 

In the first incident, Jewish settlers from the illegal settlement of Maskiyot began construction in the Ein al-Hilweh Spring, which has been a source of freshwater for villages and hundreds of Palestinian families in that area. The seizure of the spring has been developing for months, all under the watchful eye of the Israeli occupation army.

In the United States we now live under a government that largely operates in secret, headed by an executive that ignores the constitutional separation of powers and backed by a legislature that is more interested in social engineering than in benefitting the American people. The US, together with its best friend and faux ally Israel, has become the ultimate rogue nation, asserting its right to attack anyone at any time who refuses to recognize Washington’s leadership. America is a country in decline, its influence having been eroded by a string of foreign policy and military disasters starting with Vietnam and more recently including Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen and the Ukraine. As a result, respect for the United States has plummeted most particularly over the past twenty years since the War on Terror was declared and the country has become a debtor nation as it prints money to sustain a pointless policy of global hegemony which no one else either desires or respects.

Back when Paul Weyrich partied like it was 1999, he made a monumental admission that explains the ferocity of today’s evangelical right.

In an open letter to his extreme conservative cohorts, he acknowledged that they “probably had lost the culture war.”

Yippie!!!

He was right. And today that reality means that American democracy – and the human race – may actually survive.

Weyrich was mourning …

… a cultural collapse of historic proportions, a collapse so great that it simply overwhelms politics … the United States is very close to becoming a state totally dominated by an alien ideology, an ideology bitterly hostile to Western culture.

The counter-cultural heathens against whom Weyrich ranted were shaped by the Vietnam war, rock music, LSD, and so much more … a ‘60s Boomer generation (76-million-strong) that utterly shattered the established mores on which the right wing depended.

The “alien ideology” Weyrich feared was feminist, LGBTQA+, post-White Supremacist, and at war with Trump misogyny, sexual Puritanism, imperial arrogance, fascist autocracy, and ecological insanity.

Another Irradiated and Charred Victim of the Nagasaki Bomb

77 years ago (August 9, 1945) an all-Christian bomber crew dropped an experimental plutonium bomb on Nagasaki City, Japan, instantly incinerating, asphyxiating and/or vaporizing tens of thousands of innocent civilians, mostly women and children. Very few Japanese soldiers were killed by the bombs.

Japan’s major religions are Shitoism and Buddhism, but a disproportionate number of the dead at Nagasaki were Christian. The bomb also wounded uncounted tens of thousands of other victims who suffered the blast trauma, the intense heat and/or the radiation sickness that killed and maimed so many of the survivors.

Newspapers were once the leaders in covering business news in their communities. The daily Columbus Dispatch just abdicated that title to Columbus Business First, a weekly. Both have active websites.

The Dispatch announced a few months that it no longer would have a free-standing business section on Mondays. Last week its editor-apologist Alan Miller announced it would no longer have a free-standing section on Tuesday through Saturday. Can the elimination of the Sunday business section be far behind?

Why? The obvious reasons appear to be that readership of business news in the Dispatch is on freefall and that advertising in the business section is disappearing rapidly. That is too bad because at one time the Dispatch had top-notch business reporters though I noticed recently that the paper was running more press releases from major Columbus companies under business reporters' bylines.

I read Daniel Sherrell’s Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World sitting on the edge of what was left of the Shenandoah River after a summer of very little rain. Six inches is enough to canoe in but it’s less than that in many places. Fish are few and far between, yet humans are out there in canoes, dragging them over rocks, casting their lines, luring the last fish to their doom. I know the fish murders are not the problem, not at this scale. The problem is the power lines hanging low across the water, the 12-foot American Flag hung up on the shore, the massive actions of corrupt governments and industries — but also the cabin my family’s in and the car that drove us to it — not to mention the airplanes audible from great distances and tricking the mind into hoping for thunder.

MEK is a curious hybrid creature that pretends to be an alternative government option for Iran even though it is despised by nearly all Iranians.

One might ask if Washington’s obsession with terrorism includes supporting radical armed groups as long as they are politically useful in attacking countries that the US regards as enemies? It is widely known that the American CIA worked with Saudi Arabia to create al-Qaeda to attack the Russians in Afghanistan and the same my-enemy’s-enemy thinking appears to drive the current relationships with radical groups in Syria.

In 2015, Alice Sabatini was an 18-year-old contestant in the Miss Italia contest in Italy. She was asked what epoch of the past she would have liked to live in. She replied: WWII. Her explanation was that her text books go on and on about it, so she’d like to actually see it, and she wouldn’t have to fight in it, because only men did that. This led to a great deal of mockery. Did she want to be bombed or starved or sent to a concentration camp? What was she, stupid? Somebody photoshopped her into a picture with Mussolini and Hitler. Somebody made an image of a sunbather viewing troops rushing onto a beach.[i]

What if . . . ?

I get lost — tangled in doubt and cynicism — when I try to pose the question in a more specific way. What if . . . a collective human voice could be heard, crying out across the borders as the pandemic surges, as the fires rage, as the planet’s life-sustaining climate collapses: “We are one”?

What if nationalism’s time has come and gone?

Open Democracy put the matter thus: “As the COVID-19 pandemic intensifies around the world, we are witnessing countries making unprecedented decisions to close borders to non-citizens. And as days pass, national borders have become more visible and less permeable than ever.”