Over the past couple of years, as protest movements in response to Trump and the alt-right have ramped up in intensity in Portland, Oregon, so has the aggressive use of dispersal tactics on leftist demonstrators by police.
The first boats to successfully break the Gaza siege in 2008 were the Free Gaza and the Liberty. They carried 44 people from 17 countries. Their triumphant arrival marked a historic moment for the international solidarity movement. “There were many moving scenes as Palestinians learned how far we had come from to offer solidarity - their Israel overlords had told the Palestinians for years that nobody cared about them, which is a big line,” said solidarity activist Roger Fowler.
On August 9, a U.S.-supported Saudi airstrike bombed a bus carrying schoolchildren in Sa’ada, a city in northern Yemen. The attack killed at least forty-three people. “This conflict is backed by the U.S. and the U.K.,” journalist Nima Elbagir said. “They are in full support of the Saudi-led activities in Yemen today.”
We live in a perilous time of rising great power tensions, the ascendency of right-wing autocracies, uncertainties, and renewed nuclear and high-tech arms races. This is compounded by the reality that there are no longer any givens in US foreign and military policies or to the future of liberal democracy in the US.
One reason bullshit jobs endure is that they are politically convenient for a lot of powerful people. - David Graeber
I got deployed to Afghanistan, and my experience overseas showed me that if anything, I was making a difference for those with power and wealth. In fact, I didn’t really find what we were being told in America to be reflective of what was really going on in Afghanistan. In the simplest of terms, I felt like we were the big bully and the purveyor of violence. I was just using all of this expensive equipment in one of the poorest places on earth to serve the interests of a capitalist class.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019