Stuart Jeanne Bramhall's Blog: The Most Revolutionary Act , page 1355

Ecosystems, Cybernetics and the Club of Rome

All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace*

Adam Curtis

BBC (2011)

Part 2

Film Review

Part 2 in this series discusses how utopian ideas about computers led the scientific community to promote a totally erroneous model of natural ecosystems.

The term ecosystem was first defined by ecologist Arthur Tansley. He mistakenly believed that ecosystems work just like computers – that all of nature is linked through organized networks that self-regulate by means of feedback loops. As ecology became the predominant scientific discipline of the early seventies, he and his colleagues went so far as to portray these interconnected networks as electrical circuits. Meanwhile Silicon Valley computer engineers, heavily influenced by Ayn Rand’s radical individualism (earlier post), as well as this erroneous view of ecosystems, made a deliberate decision in 1968 to focus on personal computer technology rather than mainframe computers.

The work of Tansley and his colleagues would be totally discredited by new data that would emerge demonstrating were chaotic and unpredictable and tended towards wild fluctuations that never returned to an equilibrium point. Like many scientists, the early ecologists had oversimplified and distorted the data they collected to fit their model of nature as a self regulating system.

The Rise of Cybernetics

Meanwhile the scientific community’s fascination with computers would also give rise to the field of cybernetics, which looks at society as if human beings were a vast interconnected system of machines. Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome, was a strong proponent of this systems-oriented view of both nature and society. A strong egalitarian, Bucky envisioned a society (which he referred to as Spaceship Earth) that did away with authoritarian hierarchies and allowed people to live together as equal members of a closed system that would self-regulate – as a spacecraft does.

In the early seventies, disillusioned by the failure of the anti-Vietnam War, a half million young Americans left the cities to start experimental non-hierarchical communes in the countryside. It would be the largest mass migration in US history. Their goal was to create egalitarian communities in which people sacrificed their individuality for the benefit of the system.

Most of these communes would fail. Curtis blames their failure, without any real evidence, on a rigid absence of structure that allowed stronger and more dominant personalities to dominate and bully weaker ones. He likens the failure of the commune movement to the failed Color Revolutions* of the 1990s – which left Eastern European countries even more corrupt and unequal.

He seems to be making the case that egalitarian societies are impossible, which I strongly question. In my view the Color Revolutions failed for the same reason as the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions: because they were instigated, organized and funded by the CIA, State Department (and George Soros in the case of Eastern Europe) for the purpose of installing new governments favorable to US corporate interests.**

Enter the Club of Rome***

Two additional outcomes of the new field of ecology would be the formation, in 1968, of the elite roundtable group the Club of Rome and the first international environmental conference in Stockholm in 1972.

In 1972 the Club of Rome commissioned a study based on the theory that all human and natural activity was merely a vast interconnected system of feedback loops. The MIT computer scientists they hired developed a complex computer model based on the best population, resource, industrial production, agricultural production and pollution data. Their modeling, which the Club of Rome published in their 1973 bestseller The End of Growth, predicted major economic and environmental collapse in the first decade of the 21st century. The book maintained that the only way to prevent environmental and economic collapse was for western societies to give up their fixation with continuous economic growth.

The European left became extremely concerned that growth restriction would lock the ruling elite (who ran the Club of Rome) into their existing positions of privilege and power. They launched major protests against The End of Growth. They argued the proper role of the environmental movement should be to end the greed of political elites. That being said, the computer modeling on which the book is based predicted the 2008 economic collapse.

* Title of 1967 monograph distributed free by California cybernetics enthusiast Richard Brautigan. Available for $400 from Abe Books

**Serbia Otpor (Resistance) Revolution (2000), Georgia Rose Revolution (2003), Ukraine Orange Revolution (2004) and Kirghizistan Cotton Revolution (2005) – see The CIA Role in the Arab Spring

***The early Club of Rome was financed by corporate oligarch David Rockefeller, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (see  and the Ford Foundation. The two latter entities are well known conduits for CIA funding (see CIA-funded Foundations)

 

The Coming Split Between the US and Israel

stuartbramhall:

 

 

Obama gives Israel the finger

for 45 years, the US has refused to acknowledge or deny that Israel has nuclear weapons. All this changed last week when Obama declassified all documents related to Israel’s nuclear arsenal and their refusal to sign the nuclear anti-proliferation treaty. Israel is now exposed to the whole world as the real rogue state in the Middle East. It’s a typically passive aggressive Obama foreign policy move – but at least he did it.

Originally posted on Fig Trees and Vineyards:

Yesterday I posted an article on the recent declassification of US documents substantiating in essence not only the existence of Israel’s nuclear weapons program, but also verifying the fact that US officials knew about the program back in the late 1960s.

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Ayn Rand, Alan Greenapan and the 2008 Crash

I’ve just discovered another exciting series of documentaries by Adam Curtis

All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace*

Adam Curtis

BBC (2011)

Part I

Film Review

Despite its deceptive title, this BBC documentary is about Ayn Rand and her immense influence over Silicon Valley and Rand devotee Alan Greenspan.

Prior to seeing the film, I had no idea about the cult following Rand inspired in the computer geniuses who flocked to Silicon Valley in the late sixties. Believing they could create a new kind of democracy by combining Rand’s radical individualism with computer technology, they set up Ayn Rand reading groups and named their children after her. They were convinced that linking computers in vast self-regulated networks would do away with the need for politicians and authoritarian hierarchies. However instead of decentralizing power, as they envisioned, the computer revolution only further concentrated the power of wealthy elites.

Rand called her underlying philosophy “objectivism” and disseminated it through her novels and a close-knit group of devotees. It was a philosophy of selfishness. She believed it was in the best interest of humanity for everyone to pursue their own rational self interest, unimpeded by religion or morality. She maintained that altruism was especially destructive, as it interfered with happiness and freedom.

Rand Devotee Alan Greenspan

Former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan was an early member of Rand’s Collective, the small select group that met weekly to hear chapters of her newest novel. He married a fellow Collective member and remained fiercely loyal to Rand even after her sexual jealousy broke up the group.

After cunningly convincing one of her strongest supporters to follow his own self-interest by having an affair with her, she somehow persuaded his wife (also a Collective member) to commit the sin of altruism by agreeing to it. When he continued to follow his own self interest by becoming romantically involved with a younger woman, Rand brutally attacked him (verbally and physically) and ordered him out of the Collective.

The Most Powerful Man in the World

After becoming Federal Reserve chairman in 1987, Greenspan became the most powerful man in the world.** In 1993, he somehow persuade the newly elected Bill Clinton to cut taxes instead of restoring the social programs Reagan and Bush had cut (as he promised during his campaign). Greenpan argued this would cause markets to boom, enabling Clinton to repay the sizable federal debt he inherited from Reagan and Bush.

So Clinton cut social programs even further. Markets boomed, as Greenspan predicted, but not because of tax cuts. The real cause was an enormous credit bubble by massive Wall Street lending to unstable Southeast Asian markets. All the Wall Street banks erroneously believed that feedback loops in their computer networks would protect them by allowing them to hedge (bet against) their risky loans.

Greenspan Recognizes His Error

By 1996, even Greenspan could see that productivity wasn’t increasing despite the massive increase in profits. He tried to warn Congress that stocks were overvalued in his December 1996 “rational exuberance” speech.*** The corporate media crucified him and he recanted, acknowledging that computers might be increasing productivity he ways he couldn’t decipher.

Robert Rubin Launches Indonesian Coup

The credit bubble Wall Street created in Southeast Asia led Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea and Indonesia built thousands of homes and commercial buildings that couldn’t be sold. In 1997, the bubble burst. Clinton, who was busy being impeached over Monica Lewinsky, was powerless to act. He allowed his Treasury Secretary, former Goldman Sachs executive Robert Rubin, to take over his Southeast Asia policy. Rubin, in turn, organized an attempted coup against Indonesian president Suharto for refusing to accept an IMF bailout.

Faced with massive civil unrest, Suharto eventually accepted the bailout and the structural adjustment conditions the IMF imposed (massive cuts in government spending on food subsidies and other social services, throwing millions of people out of worked). As typically happens, the IMF bailouts went to pay off the Wall Street banks. While the IMF-imposed austerity cuts (helped along by currency trader George Soros) led the currencies of all four countries to collapse. Residents of Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea and Indonesia were plunged into abject poverty comparable to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

China Escapes from Wall Street Domination

The most important outgrowth of the 1997-98 Southeast Asia economic crisis was a major shift in Chinese economic policy. Determined to remove themselves from Wall Street domination, China’s leaders devalued their currency, flooded the US with cheap consumer goods and used their profits to finance growing US indebtedness by buying US Treasury bonds.

In the mean time, Greenspan cut interest rates to near zero percent and the US was flooded with trillions of dollars of cheap (borrowed) money. Wall Street, in turn, recycled these funds as subprime loans to the third world population in American ghettos.

Again believing computers would keep them safe, Wall Street banks created the largest credit bubble in history. When it burst in 2008 Wall Street, as usual, got bailed out. This time Americans paid for the bailout, as they were plunged into widereaching soul-crunching misery.

The documentary features fascinating archival interviews with Rand and members of her Collective.

* Title of 1967 monograph distributed free by California cybernetics enthusiast Richard Brautigan. Available for $400 from Abe Books

**On reflection, it seems a great pity Rand didn’t have the affair with Greenspan. We could have been spared the 2008 economic crash.

***”How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?”

 

The History of CIA-Funded Foundations

Who Paid the Piper: The Cultural Cold War1

by Frances Stoner Saunders

Granta Publications (199)

 

Book Review

Who Paid the Piper: The Cultural Cold War is about the covert “cultural” propaganda the CIA carried out between 1950 and 1967. The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the centerpiece of this operation, had offices in 35 countries, published over 20 magazines, held art exhibitions and provided major financial support for American artists, poets, authors and playwrights. Its primary purpose was to “nudge” the intelligentsia of Western Europe away from Marxism and communism towards a more accommodating view of US interests.

At the end of World War II, Europeans tended to view the US as “a culturally barren nation of gum chewing, Chevy driving, Dupont-sheathed Philistines.” To counteract this stigma, Truman issued an appendix to executive order NSC-4A, directing the CIA director to undertake covert psychological activities in support of American anti-Communist policies.

As Saunders details, this strategy included CIA support for both US and foreign Non-Communist Left (NCL) organizations, trade unions who agreed to weed out “dangerous radicals” and leftist intellectuals. The rationale was to create and support “parallel” organizations to provide an alternative to Communist groups over which the CIA had no control.

A strong advocate of this approach was “liberal” Kennedy adviser and biographer Arthur Schlesinger, a long time member of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. He was one of the few non non-CIA employees Congress members who knew the CIA was running it. Schlesinger also sat on the executive committee of Radio Free Europe, which the CIA set up in 1950.

Without Budgetary Limits or Oversight

Over the next two decades the CIA acted as a de facto ministry of culture, pumping millions of dollars into the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The Congress had no budgetary limits and was accountable to no one for the way they spent their money.

Via the this front organization, the CIA built the reputations of numerous American composers by funding European premiers of their work. Among the most prominent were Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, George Gershwin, Menotti and Aaron Copeland.

They also financed European performances of American plays, in essence solidifying the careers of Lillian Hellman, Eugene O’Neill, Thorton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, William Saroyan, Clifford Odets, and John Steinbeck.

And paid for the European distribution of American books, by authors such as Louisa May Alcott, Faulkner, Hemingway, James Thurber, Edith Wharton, Thomas Wolfe, T.S. Eliot and socialists Norman Cousins and Carl Sandburg.

The Wall Street Families Who Started the CIA

Who Paid the Piper focuses heavily on the personalities of the men who founded the Office for Strategic Services (OSS), which in 1947 would evolve into the CIA. Nearly all were from wealthy Ivy League and Wall Street families who attended the same cocktail parties and sent their kids to the same prep schools. They automatically identified the “American way” with the privileges of their class, including a well-rounded classical education. During this period, it was fairly common for high level CIA officers to edit literary magazines, as well as publishing poetry and fiction and writing book reviews for the New York Times.

The Rise of CIA-Funded Foundations

Although Tom Braden, director of the CIA’s International Operations Division (IOD), ran the Congress, on paper it appeared to drive its funding from “pass-through” foundations. The best known foundations serving as a conduit for covert CIA funds were (are?) the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Kaplan Foundation, the Whitney Trust and the Farfield Foundation. Many of these foundations set up separate administrative units to handle CIA pass through money and collaborate with them on specific projects.

Arthur Schlesinger sat on the board of Farfield Foundation, as did William van den Heuvel, another prominent liberal close to the Kennedy family (and father of Katherine van den Heuvel editor of the “left leaning” Nation magazine).

C. D. Jackson, long time managing director of Time-Life International was another high profile Congress member.2 The Congress also assigned a full time CIA operative to Paramount pictures. His role was to edit and reject scripts that portrayed the US in an unfavorable light.

Tom Braden Goes Public

In 1966, details of the CIA role in the Congress for Cultural Freedom were leaked to the radical zine Ramparts and ended up as a New York Times expose. A few months later Braden, who left the CIA in 1956, published a confessional in the Saturday Evening Post. In “I’m Glad the CIA is Immoral,” he brags about all the reporters and trade unions on the CIA payroll when he ran the OID.

A growing body of research indicates that the CIA continues to fund the Non-Communist Left. Based on the work of Sherman Skolnick, Bob Feldman, Brian Salter and others who research the 990A tax returns of so-called “liberal” foundations, CIA pass-through foundations are clearly alive and well.

Frequently referred to as “Left Gatekeeping Foundations,” they fund numerous so-called “alternative” media outlets. This may be why the Nation, Democracy Now, FAIR and similar outlets that rely on pass-through founding categorically refuse to cover the 9-11 Truth movement or the clear government role in the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King.

1The book was published in the US under the title The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. The CIA has posted a review of the US edition on website

2In 1953-54, Jackson was instrumental in establishing the Bilderberg Group. In 1963 he purchased the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination and kept it out of the public domain by locking it in a Time-Life vault for 15 years.

In the following video, liberal feminist Gloria Steinem discusses the funding she received from the CIA for her work:

Originally posted at Veterans Today

RT: ‘United Continent’: European volunteers fighting Kiev troops in Eastern Ukraine – OR – The Divine Masculine rises to defend what is right! Thanks to J., a Reader!

stuartbramhall:

 

 

Hundreds of European volunteers join separatists in fighting Kiev troops in Eastern Ukraine. Clear parallels here with the international brigades that poured into Spain during the Spanish civil war. The goal then – as now – was to stop a fascist takeover.

Originally posted on 2012: What's the 'real' truth?:

Published time: August 30, 2014 11:02

http://youtu.be/YQFztkaOOII

European volunteers are streaming into Ukraine to join the fighting on both sides. While Kiev’s forces are beefed up with mercenaries from private military companies, Europeans have also come to defend the rebel Donbass region of their own free will.

One of the latest reinforcements of anti-Kiev troops in Eastern Ukraine are four French ex-serviceman who have come to fight this war, thousands of kilometers from home.

“It’s our war. It’s everybody’s war, it’s every European’s war,” Guillaume, a French fighter in Ukraine defending the Donbass region, told RT’s Paula Slier.

French fighter Guillaume. Screenshot from RT video

Another volunteer, 25-year-old Nikola, used to be a professional soldier with the elite French mountain troops for five years. Now he’s putting his skills to good use in Ukraine. Alongside a contingent of other foreign volunteers, he’s training anti-Kiev forces in urban guerilla warfare.

“These…

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Is Left-Right Collaboration Possible?

  Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State.

Ralph Nader (2014)

Book Review

A long time consumer advocate, Nader has spent most of his career battling the corporate takeover of government and US society. Although most analysts place him to the left of the Democratic Party, he frequently allies himself with libertarians and populist conservatives in specific campaigns. He now maintains the only way to restore accountable Constitutional government is by forming what he calls right-left convergences.

Traditional Labels Meaningless

Nader begins by defining “right” and “left,” as both have ceased to have any real meaning. He devotes an entire chapter to dispelling the common myths people from opposite ends of the political spectrum have about each other. He begins by discussing the philosophical architects responsible for the basic principles that underpin conservatism and libertarianism, with special emphasis on Adam Smith, Ludvig Van Mises, Frank Meyer, Russell Kirk and Peter Viereck. He goes on to trace links between contemporary conservatism and the 19th century populist movement in which farmers fought big banks and big railroads. This movement, commonly referred to as the “populist” or “decentralist” movement, would eventually evolve into Goldwater and Reagan conservatism. Nader maintains that many contemporary Republicans who call themselves “conservative” are really corporatists or corporate statists – working primarily for the benefit of the corporations who put them into office.

The US Left represents too many different tendencies – liberals, progressives, socialist, anarchists – to agree on a single overarching political philosophy.

Although Nader doesn’t mention it, many prominent figures identified with the so-called Non-Communist Left have been discredited by accepting major funding from CIA pass-through foundations.1

Issues Ripe for Collaboration and Potential Obstacles

Nader identifies 25 potential issues that are ripe for collaboration between existing left and right-leaning movements (see below).2

He feels the biggest potential obstacle to potential is the knee-jerk ideological reaction of major party activists. It’s often hard to move Democratic Party loyalists past the tired knee-jerk reaction that conservatives are too narrow-minded, dogmatic and self-interested to be worthwhile coalition partners. Meanwhile many conservatives have the mistaken belief that all leftists are covert socialists who are only interested in big government, more welfare spending, more business regulation, more debt and and higher taxes.

Nader bemoans the tendency of ideologues from both ends of the political spectrum to get so focused in dogma and abstractions that they can’t lose sight of the constitutional crisis in front of them.

This is partly why left-right convergences tend to me more effective at the local level, where people are already shoulder-to-shoulder confronting the practicalities they face everyday. This is certainly consistent with what Susan Clark and Woden Teachout describe in Slow Democracy, their book on local direct democracy. It also reflects the the experience of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), which unites activists across the political spectrum in outlawing fracking, toxic sludge, factory farms and water bottling plants.

Examples of Successful Left-Right Collaboration

Unstoppable goes on to provide numerous examples of high profile right-left alignments in Congress (see below). 3

The main value of the book, in my view, is to remind us of the political power of strange bedfellow alliances and to discourage knee-jerk reactions to collaborating with people of different ideological persuasions. Since Unstoppable went to print, a left-right congressional convergence prevented Obama from going to war against Syria, and left-right convergences in Washington and Oregon passed ballot initiatives legalizing marijuana.

1Frances Stonor Saunders discusses this at length in her 1999 book Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War.

2Personally, I think Nader’s list is too long. I myself would prioritize 6, 12, 14 and 22, as I already see evidence of left-right collaboration on these specific issues:

Requiring annual auditing of the defense budget and that ALL government budgets (including the CIA and NSA) be disclosed.
Ending corporate welfare and bailouts.
Promoting efficiency in government contracting and government spending.
Adjusting the minimum wage to inflation.
Introducing specific tax reform as well as pushing to regain uncollected taxes.
Breaking up the “Too Big to Fail” banks.
Expanding contributions to charity, using these funds to increase jobs and draw on available “dead money” (i.e. recycle wealth from millionaires and billionaires).
Legislating to allow taxpayers the standing to sue all government and “immune” corporations.
Expanding direct democracy by introducing ballot initiatives in the states that don’t have them and simplifying recall processes.
Pushing community self-reliance.
Clearing away obstacles to a competitive electoral process.
Restoring civil liberties.
Enhance civic skills and experience for students.
Ending unconstitutional wars and enforcing Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which gives Congress the exclusive authority to declare war.
Revising trade agreements to protect US sovereignty and ending fast track approval for treaties.
Protecting children from commericialism and the physical and mental harm it causes.
Ending corporate personhood.
Controlling more of the commons than we already own.
Getting tough on corporate crime.
Ramping up investor power by strengthening investor-protection laws.
Opposing the patenting of life forms.
Ending the ineffective war on drugs.
Pushing for environmentalism.
Reforming health care.
Creating convergent institutions.

3 Among many others:

• The left-right coalition that stopped the Clinch River Breeder Reactor in 1983

• The left-right coalition that passed the False Claims Amendment Act in 1986 to protect whistleblowers who uncovered fraud in government contracts. The passage of the McCain (R)–Feingold (D) Act to reform campaign financing in 2003.

• The left-right coalition Ron Paul formed with sympathetic Democrats to introduce a bill to legalize industrial hemp in 2005.

• The bill Ron Wyden (D) and Rand Paul (R) introduced to legalize industrial hemp in 2013.

• The bill Ron Wyden (D) and Lisa Murkowski introducing requiring the reporting of donations over $1,000 to any group engaged in federal political activity.

 

Portrait of a Pathological Killer

Classic PTSD in an orca (killer whale)

Blackfish

Gabriela Cowperthwaite (2013)

Film Review

Blackfish is a psychological study of a 33 year old orca whale who performs at SeaWorld in Orlando, Florida.

Despite their fearsome nickname (“killer whales”), orcas don’t eat people. They have diverse diets, with individual populations preferring fish, marine mammals and even other whale species.

In the wild they have a reputation for approaching human beings with friendliness and curiosity. Even in captivity, their demeanor towards their trainers is generally docile and friendly.

Over the course of 20 years, Tilikum has killed three people, two trainers and a member of the public who sneaked into his pen after hours. As Blackfish documents, this is on top of several near death incidents in which trainers were seriously injured. Viewers will be particularly impressed that the murders were premeditated. Tilikum exhibits clear planning and malicious cunning in all of his attacks. If he were human, he would be charged with first degree murder.

The film offers an accurate and convincing account of the severe psychological trauma Tilikum and other orcas endure in captivity, where their lifespan is foreshortened by 75 years. The film combines testimonials from whale hunters and researchers, OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Agency) experts and lawyers and SeaWorld executives to give a glimpse of the close net clan groupings orcas form in the wild and the severe trauma they experience when they are captured to perform at SeaWorld.

There are three particularly heart wrenching scenes where SeaWorld management forcibly separates orca mothers from their calves – against the advice of their trainers.

I have always strongly suspected orcas were more intelligent than human beings. Based on the events described in this documentary, they are clearly more intelligent than the people who run SeaWorld.

OSHA’s successful prosecution of SeaWorld in 2011 resulted in a $75,000 fine and a ruling requiring SeaWorld to install physical barriers between orcas and their trainers. Unbelievably SeaWorld appealed the ruling, fearing their ticket take would suffer if trainers ceased to interact with the orcas in the water.

In April 2014, the Court of Appeals upheld the OSHA ban.

At present, there is an international campaign to pressure SeaWorld to allow Tilikum to participate in a stepwise ocean release program. You can sign the petition here: http://www.freetillynow.org/

 

BUSTED!!!!! Is Our Government Is Running Fake Twitter Accounts To Sway Popular Opinion Against Michael Brown and #Ferguson

stuartbramhall:

 

 

How the US government is running fake twitter accounts (through troll bots) to sway popular opinion against Michael Brown and #Ferguson. I guess they’re trying to counteract the effect of the “black twitter” hashtag protest over Brown’s shooting. See how blacktwitter made michael brown’s death front_page_news

Originally posted on The MadMan Chronicles:

in today’s “GTFOHWTBS news…

Our loyal MadMan Libba brought this to our attention.. no preamble… just watch and decide for yourself.  Thanks Libba!

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How Putin Just Saved Europe, and Other Geopolitical Tales

stuartbramhall:

 

 

Russian sanctions are destroying European agriculture.

Originally posted on Amanah Satu - Malaysia:

Capitalist Exploits

By: Chris Tell

Picture this scenario. A brother and sister squabbling with one another. Something’s gone wrong, they’re blaming each other, fighting, and generally at each other’s throats. Along comes the boy from next door who pokes fun at one of them and starts pestering them. Brother and sister rapidly put aside their differences, join forces and deal with the boy from next door.

The saying, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” has played itself out many times throughout  history and, while geo-political relationships may not be as close as siblings, the forming of alliances and the repercussions from having joint enemies can be profound.

During the second World War Stalin realized that he needed the Allies to defeat a Nazi invasion, and in turn the Allies realized that the Soviets were necessary for the war effort. In any other scenario the Allies would have been…

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ASSATA

stuartbramhall:

 

 

A primer of racism in Amerika.

Originally posted on Libya 360°:

By Les Blough
Axis of Logic

August 26, 2014

“It didn’t matter what position you took, it mattered that people related to those positions, that people understood what you were saying, that people supported you…. The government perceived us as a threat because they understood that we were serious, they understood we were serious and they understood also that we were becoming a more sophisticated opposition.” –Assata Shakur

Writing an adequate review of Assata Shakur’s autobiography that captures the essence of this woman and her history is no easy task. The story of her life beginning in early childhood to her life and work as a leading Black Revolutionary in the US to the present day is so packed and refined with fascinating, frightening and fire-eating details that one is only left to select from the gold for there is no dross to exclude. This review contains some of the…

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