"This is the time when things which till then had been communicated but never exchanged; given but never sold; acquired but never bought -- virtue, love, conviction, knowledge, conscience, etc. -- when everything, in short, passed into commerce. It is the time of great corruption, of universal venality...." Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, 1845.
The long-suffering people of Haiti suffered a catastrophic blow in February, 2004 when U.S. Marines kidnapped and deposed democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The U.S., supported by Canada and France, forced him into exile, forbade him from even returning to the hemisphere, and reestablished a despotic interim puppet government backed and enforced by so-called UN peacekeepers and a brutal Haitian National Police.
The first World Health Organization (WHO) study on domestic violence couldn't have come at a better time for women's advocates in
Jerry Lembcke is the author of "The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam". In 1969, he was assigned to the 41st Artillery Group in Vietnam as a Chaplain's Assistant, and joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War when he returned in 1970. As an associate professor of sociology at Holy Cross College during the Persian Gulf War, Lembcke began to research the origins of stories about Vietnam Veterans being spit on by female antiwar protesters. Not only did the stories conflict with Lembcke's experiences as a veteran and member of the anti-war movement in the 1970's, he could not find a single documented case of a veteran being spit on.
The recent recovery of several skeletons from a mass grave in Gujarat, most probably Muslim victims of the state sponsored pogrom in 2002, is a ghastly reminder that the culprits of one of the worst communal riots have not been brought to justice.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019