The Bush administration launched the "War on Terror" after 9/11 nearly twenty years ago. It has since roared on into an endless conflict spanning the globe, costing hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of US taxpayers’ dollars.
“The U.N. system really failed the people of Myanmar particularly the Rohingya by treading softly,” said Human Rights Watch’s U.N. Director Louis Charbonneau. “Now instead of us saying ‘never again’ after Sri Lanka, Rwanda, Srebrenica—here we are saying well yet again it happened."
The First World War — known as the “Great War” in Europe — has largely faded from memory on this side of the Atlantic. Arguably, this is because our involvement was so brief — joining the slaughter over two years after it began and leaving it just over eighteen months later. But, beyond the fact that it claimed the lives of over 100,000 Americans, there are good reasons why, a century later, we should remember this chapter in our history, not least because it has ominous parallels with today.
Halfway through the year, the number of large strikes in the United States is at the highest level in decades.
It is past time for the U.S. government to be wrested out of the stranglehold of evangelical conservatives. The rights of women and the LGBTQ community especially cannot be held hostage to the retrograde visions of this politically powerful faction.
Source: The Guardian
I’m 93, and, as extremism sweeps across Europe, I fear we are doomed to repeat the mistakes which created the Holocaust
Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel stated this summer that “when the generation that survived the war is no longer here, we’ll find out whether we have learned from history”. As a Polish Jew born in 1925, who survived the Warsaw ghetto, lost my family in the Holocaust, served in a special operations unit of the Polish underground, the Home Army, and fought in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, I know what it means to be at the sharp end of European history – and I fear that the battle to draw the right lessons from that time is in danger of being lost.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019