WikiLeaks has given us real news about those who govern us and take us to war, not the preordained, repetitive spin that fills newspapers and television screens. This is real journalism; and for the crime of real journalism, Julian Assange has spent most of the past decade in one form of incarceration or another, including Belmarsh prison, a horrific place.
Source: Truthout
The tape is searing. There is the voice of an infant screaming as he is wrenched from his mother, who pleads, “There is nothing wrong with my baby. Why are you doing this to us? I would’ve been hung years ago, wouldn’t I? Because (as an Australian Aborigine) you’re guilty before you’re found innocent.” The child’s grandmother demands to know why “the stealing of our kids is happening all over again.” A welfare official says, “I’m gunna take him, mate.”
Source: The Guardian Unlimited
Neoliberalism has failed the vast majority of India’s people. But the spirit that gave the nation independence is stirring.
In five-star hotels on Mumbai’s seafront, children of the rich squeal joyfully as they play hide and seek. Nearby, at the National Theatre for the Performing Arts, people arrive for the Mumbai literary festival: famous authors and notables from India’s Raj class. They step deftly over a woman lying across the pavement, her birch brooms laid out for sale, her two children silhouettes in a banyan tree that is their home.
Source: The New Statesman
The island led to freedom by the militants of Xanana Gusmão and José Ramos-Horta is still seen as a colony by Washington and its local sheriffs, Australia and Indonesia, hungry for resources.
Milan Kundera’s truism “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting” described East Timor. The day before I set out to film clandestinely there in 1993, I went to Stanfords map shop in London’s Covent Garden. “Timor?” said a hesitant sales assistant. We stood staring at shelves marked “South-East Asia”. “Forgive me, where exactly is it?”
Source: Green Left Weekly
How do wars begin? With a “master illusion”, according to Ralph McGehee, one of the CIA’s pioneers in “black propaganda”, known today as “news management”.
In 1983, he described to me how the CIA had faked an “incident” that became the “conclusive proof of North Vietnam’s aggression”.
This followed a claim, also fake, that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked a US warship in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964.
“The CIA”, he said, “loaded up a junk, a North Vietnamese junk, with communist weapons — the Agency maintains communist arsenals in the United States and around the world.
Source: The New Statesman
Rapacious business interests have made profit the new first principle of top-class sport. But all over the world, from South Africa to Liverpool and Manchester, fans are mobilising to reclaim the people’s pleasure.
As Tiger Woods returns to golf, not all his affairs are salacious headlines. The Tiger Woods Golf Course in Dubai is costing $100m to build. Dubai relies on cheap third-world labour, as do certain consumer brands that have helped make Woods a billionaire. A representative of Nike workers in Thailand wrote to him, expressing their "utmost respect for your skill and perseverance as an athlete" but pointing out that they would need to work 72,000 years "to receive what you will earn [from your Nike] contract".
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019