May 2015 - Toward Freedom

Chelsea Manning: The years since I was jailed for releasing the ‘war diaries’ have been a rollercoaster

Chelsea Manning May 28, 2015 Chelsea Manning

It can be difficult, sometimes, to make sense of all the things that have happened to me in the last five years

Today marks five years since I was ordered into military confinement while deployed to Iraq in 2010. I find it difficult to believe, at times, just how long I have been in prison. Throughout this time, there have been so many ups and downs – it often feels like a physical and emotional roller coaster.

It all began in the first few weeks of 2010, when I made the life-changing decision to release to the public a repository of classified (and unclassified but “sensitive” ) documents that provided a simultaneously horrific and beautiful outlook on the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. After spending months preparing to deploy to Afghanistan in 2008, switching to Iraq in 2009 and actually staying in Iraq from 2009-10, I quickly and fully recognized the importance of these documents to the world at large. read more

Beyond the Middle East: The Rohingya Genocide

Ramzy Baroud May 28, 2015 Ramzy Baroud

“Nope, nope, nope,” was Australia’s Prime Minister, Tony Abbott’s answer to the question whether his country will take in any of the nearly 8,000 Rohingya refugees stranded at sea.

A Growing Resistance Movement in US Prisons Seeks to End Slavery and Torture Behind Bars

Ben Turk May 27, 2015 Ben Turk

There is a widespread, growing and committed resistance movement happening in US prisons across the nation. This movement is not going away, and with more outside support and national coordination, it could be powerful enough to reshape not only the US prison system, but the entire society.

An “Other” Feminism: A Review of Hilary Klein’s Compañeras: Zapatista Women’s Stories

Charlotte Maria Sáenz May 27, 2015 Charlotte Maria Sáenz

Volumes have been written about the Mayan indigenous Zapatista social movement of Chiapas, Mexico since they made their first public appearance on January 1, 1994. However, until now, we were missing the direct voices of women from the communities themselves. Hilary Klein’s Compañeras: Zapatista Women’s Stories reveals their perspectives as contemporary indigenous women who are active subjects together with men in shared processes of change and liberation.

Post-Elections in Britain: Does It Matter?

Immanuel Wallerstein May 24, 2015 Immanuel Wallerstein

In the middle of the seventeenth century, the United Provinces (more or less today’s Netherlands) was the hegemonic power of the capitalist world-system, which was then geographically smaller. Within this world-system, it was the wealthiest country with the most efficient industrial enterprises.

Africa as Battlefield

Super User May 24, 2015 Super User

Source: Jacobin Magazine

The US is trying to win “hearts and minds” in Africa. It’s not going well.

Today, as the US military increasingly sees Africa as a “battlefield” against Islamist extremism, a significant number of its operations there have taken on the form of a textbook hearts-and-minds campaign that harkens back to failed US efforts in Southeast Asia during the 1960s and 1970s and more recently in the greater Middle East.

In Vietnam, the so-called civilian half of the war — building schools, handing out soap, and offering rudimentary medical care — was obliterated by American heavy firepower that wiped out homes, whole hamlets, and whatever goodwill had been gained. As a result, US counterinsurgency doctrine was tossed into the military’s dustbin — only to be resurrected decades later, as the Iraq War raged, by then-Gen. and later CIA Director David Petraeus. read more