June 2013 - Page 3 of 6 - Toward Freedom

Fighting Words: Toward Freedom in Africa

Greg Guma June 18, 2013 Greg Guma

In September 1955 an editorial column in Toward Freedom, titled “Consent of the Governed,” criticized “the tendency to make the communist issue so big that it obscured all others.” During the recent Bandung conference, which had launched the non-aligned movement, the editor noted that the US press had focused hard on public criticisms of Soviet subversion. But it had ignored other statements by world leaders that “urged the third way of emphasizing democracy and the consent of the governed.”

Society of Addiction: Capitalism and the Consumer Junkie

Nicholas Powers June 18, 2013 Nicholas Powers

Source: The Indypendent

I waited three months to eat a Krispy Kreme. I mean I waited. Every week or so, I take the train to Penn Station, quickly zigzagging through crowds. And every time I have the same internal monologue — Don’t stop at the Krispy Kreme. Don’t give yourself diabetes. Seriously, you might as well inject Elmer’s glue straight into your heart. But then I saw the store, bright and beautiful and smelling good. It’s very hard to walk past Krispy Kreme. It’s like those dreams where my legs move but I don’t go forward. read more

Repression of protestors threatens Turkish democracy

Jon Soske and Rick Halpern June 18, 2013 Jon Soske and Rick Halpern

Source: The Toronto Star

Excerpt:

For the past two days, the Turkish police have laid siege to sections of Istanbul. No other word comes close to capturing the scale and brutality of what has transpired since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered an operation on Saturday night to clear Gezi Park, the site of a peaceful occupation by an estimated 10,000 demonstrators for the past two weeks.

Thousands of accounts circulated by social media, confirmed by videos now widely available online, report groups of police savagely beating unarmed and supine protestors in the middle of the streets. Chemicals mixed into water cannon sprays have left protestors and bystanders with extensive skin burns. A hotel and a hospital providing aid to those caught up in the chaos were attacked, including an area functioning as a clinic and nursery. The police have employed tear gas and pepper spray on such a large scale that the air in entire neighbourhoods has become temporarily unbreathable. read more

The Hashimoto Controversy and Japan’s Failure to Come to Terms with its Past

Walden Bello June 17, 2013 Walden Bello

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus

The words were so brazen that they have created a firestorm globally. Characterized as “outspoken” and “brash” in the international media, Osaka mayor Toru Hashimoto has claimed that “comfort women”—the thousands of Asian women who were forced to serve as prostitutes during the Second World War—were “necessary” for the morale of Japanese troops.

“Anyone can understand that the system of comfort women was necessary to provide respite for a group of high-strung, rough and tumble crowd of men braving their lives under a storm of bullets,” Hashimoto said, according to the Wall Street Journal. read more

Russia and the Syria-Israel Border: Background on UN Peacekeeping Forces in Global Conflicts

Rene Wadlow June 17, 2013 Rene Wadlow

President Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation volunteered his country’s troops to replace the Austrian members of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (Undof) on the de facto Syria-Israel frontier on the Golan Heights.

Change from Below: Constituent Assemblies Offer Democratic Route to Peace in Colombia

James Bargent June 13, 2013 James Bargent

Former Colombian guerrilla fighter Alirio Arroyave believes his country can turn the high-minded rhetoric of current government-paramilitary peace talks into a reality through the unrealized promise of direct democracy, a dream that persuaded him to lay down his arms twenty years ago.