Ukraine has been suffering a profound internal schism for some time now, one that is threatening to become one of those ugly civil wars that are occurring in more and more countries. The boundaries of present-day Ukraine include an east-west cleavage that is linguistic, religious, economic, and cultural, each side being close to 50% of the total.
What is permitting France's return to aggressiveness in foreign policy is precisely the decline of United States’ effective power on the world scene. Suddenly, France can seem more hardline against the enemy, now defined as the Islamic enemy, than the United States.
Albert Camus would have been 100 this November had he lived beyond the car crash which took his life in 1960. Upon receiving the Nobel Prize he said, “the nobility of our calling will always be rooted in two commitments: refusal to lie about what we know and resistance to oppression.”
Today, the world learned of the stabbing death of Greek antifascist hiphop artist Pavlos Fissas, who performed under the name MC Killah P, at the hands of thugs affiliated with the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn. His death is just the most recent since the party’s rise in recent years, but may have tipped a country teetering on the brink of civil war into incredibly volatile territory; antifascists have already clashed with police across the country, and Golden Dawn offices have been attacked.
Simone Weil's life and writings are a prime example of the effort to establish a link between society and the direction of thought.
Like plague in the 14th century, the scourge of debt has gradually migrated from South to North. Our 21st-century Yersinia pestis isn’t spread by flea-infested rats but by deadly, ideology-infested neoliberal fundamentalists. Once they had names like Thatcher or Reagan; now they sound more like Merkel or Barroso; but the message, the mentality and the medicine are basically the same.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019