As Congress moves to renew and expand the Patriot Act this week, possibly giving the FBI more powers to investigate the personal lives of U.S. citizens without judicial approval, we should ask ourselves - has freedom finally fallen to the fatalistic tandem of fear and security?
In response to an article I wrote in wake of the French "no" vote, a reader commented that I had simply produced "another article not asking why this constitution was rejected". In many ways, he was correct: irrespective of whether you thought the result was positive or negative, people ended up focusing on the consequences, but nobody really looked into why it really happened.
Much has been made of this year's G8 summit. For weeks, Scotland -- the host of the 2005 meeting -- braced itself for what many hoped would be a historic turning point in ensuring the future health of our planet and in helping the fight against poverty in Africa. So what did it produce?
Today it's fashionable to recall Martin Luther King Jr. as a civil rights hero and passionate reverend. But sadly, amidst his legacy the entirety of his intellectual prowess and vast philosophical wisdom often goes unrecognized. Particularly troubling, King has become a tool for a variety of causes wrongly associated with him, including the attack on the separation of church and state.
Paraguayan police and military attacked the peasant community of Tekojoja in Paraguay on June 24th, killing two men and leaving many injured. Paraguay's security forces were deployed to protect Brazilian Genetically Modified Soy Growers. In the melee, 270 farmers were evicted, 54 houses were burnt down and the community's crops were destroyed. Also, 130 people were arrested, many of them women and children.
Over the past two weeks, the contrast between two related "global" events has been salutary. The first was the World Tribunal on Iraq held in Istanbul; the second the G8 meeting in Scotland and the Make Poverty History campaign. Reading the papers and watching television in Britain, you would know nothing about the Istanbul meetings, which produced the most searing evidence to date of the greatest political scandal of modern times: the attack on a defenceless Iraq by America and Britain.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019