Majid Naficy: Little Armenia
The city remained apart from you
Lying beyond Zaiandeh River.
Only poets of midnight
Knocked at the door of your taverns…
Michael Simms: American Ash (text and video)
Old warriors rarely
say anything about
people they killed or
horrors they saw
Siegfried Sassoon: ‘The Hero’
The cruelty in this poem is overwhelming – as Sassoon intended. So opposed was he to jingoistic propaganda, he deliberately slashed very tender imagery with the sharpest irony.
Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J S Davies: U.S. Joins Past Empires In Afghan Graveyard
An Afghan taxi-driver in Vancouver told one of us a decade ago that this day would come. “We defeated the Persian Empire in the eighteenth century, the British in the … Continue reading
Rachel Hadas: The Mothers on the Wall
Young men stamping; clouds of dust their feet
Stir up; the gleaming weapons and the heat –
the women, poised and fearful, gazing down
as the squadron marches out of town
Tom Engelhardt: Slaughter Central
The United States as a Mass-Killing Machine
William Astore: Back to the Future at the Pentagon
‘It hardly occurs to us to question how the Pentagon’s mad military scenarios about near-peer wars could indeed end in nuclear annihilation.’
Nan Levinson: The Far Right in Uniform (corrected version)
How extreme is the military?
Thom Hartmann: The GOP Has No Interest in Actual Governing
The GOP is no longer a serious political party. Instead, it’s now a coalition of disparate groups made up of racists, homophobes, misogynists, gun nuts, conspiracy theorists and the ultra-rich.
John Feffer: How Biden Looks at the World
The Biden administration’s approach of “multilateral restoration” has many virtues compared to the last four years of MAGA. But it has considerable shortcomings as well.
Tom Engelhardt: The Sports Pages of Death
Life in a Wounded and Wounding Land
Alfred McCoy: Washington’s Delusion of Endless World Dominion
China and the U.S. Struggle over Eurasia, the Epicenter of World Power
Jeffrey Sterling: What Happened on January 6th was America the Usual
As the drama has unfolded, the powerful words from James Baldwin linger in my mind when he said “How much time do you want for your progress?”
