#truthout

[indizombie]

According to the latest data from Gaza’s health ministry, Israeli forces have killed 41,638 people since the Hamas-led October 7 attack. Many children who have survived Israel’s year-long assault thus far have been left with debilitating psychological and physical trauma. Umaiyeh Khammash, a physician who directs the West Bank-based group Juzoor, said Tuesday that more than 25,000 children in Gaza “have either lost a parent or become orphans, leaving them in deep emotional distress.” “Most children are grappling with anxiety and severe physical injuries, with many having lost limbs,” said Khammash.

Jake Johnson, ‘Genocide in Gaza Has Been Deadliest Year for Women and Kids in 2 Decades’, Truthout

[thefreethoughtprojectcom]

How will the now homeless children endure the harsh conditions during the coming winter months as the torrential rains flood the streets of Gaza, the temperature starts to drop and illnesses become more rampant?

Read More: https://thefreethoughtproject.com/foreign-affairs/us-and-israel-ensure-palestinians-will-spend-christmas-in-living-hell

[withbriefthanksgiving]

Within disability rights organizations, the presence of board members and corporate partners who have contributed to and profited from militarism can act as an obstacle to having intersectional discussions and actions around militarism and ableism. A central example is Mitsubishi, a group of Japanese multinational companies that also has headquarters in the U.S., which frequently appears as a sponsor or partners with various disability organizations in the U.S. In 1991, the Mitsubishi Electric America Foundation (MEAF) was established with a $15 million endowment from Mitsubishi Electric Corporation and the Mitsubishi Electric U.S. group companies and provided grants to multiple disability programs in the U.S. However, Mitsubishi is well-known for its engagement in militarism in collaboration with Japanese colonialism and imperialism: It has contributed to militarized violence across the globe.

[back-and-totheleft]

Oliver Stone’s Journey from Cold Warrior to America’s Untold History

PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay.

The ten-part series The Untold History of the United States is a series that unpacks much of the conventional narrative of U.S. post Cold War history. We’ve been doing a multipart series with Peter Kuznick on The Real News, coauthor of this series with Oliver Stone.

Oliver Stone, as most of you know, is one of the more celebrated filmmakers in Hollywood. Oliver is a three-time Academy Award winning director and screenwriter, a Vietnam War veteran. He’s made around two dozen acclaimed films, including Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, Nixon, W., and Wall Street and Wall Street 2.

Now Oliver Stone, as I said, with Peter Kuznick has produced this ten-part series for Showtime, The Untold History of the United States. And Oliver joins us now in the studio.

Thanks for joining us.

OLIVER STONE, FILMMAKER: Thank you, Paul.

JAY: So, first of all, congratulations. You guys took on some of the taboo subjects of American history. We don’t have to repeat it, ’cause I discussed it with Peter. I’m still kind of amazed it got on Showtime.

But let’s start at the end of the series. And the last segment is about sort of the endings of the Bush government and the beginnings of the Obama. And President Obama, when he was candidate Obama in 2008, someone asked him about the roots of his foreign-policy thinking, and he said they begin with Truman and end with Reagan. And it seems to me that’s actually the thesis of your film. The whole arc of the series is that President Obama is a continuum of that American foreign policy. So talk a bit about what those roots are and why you think President Obama is that kind of continuum.

STONE: Very much so. Do you know the word teleological, what it means?

JAY: I don’t, no.

STONE: It came to me when you were speaking about this, and I thought, the only way you can look at this is from the back to the front. You have to go to the end of the story to figure out the beginning. And that’s always what I thought it meant. It was a space term.

JAY: Which I’ve always thought is the way they should teach history. Like, start with what’s happening today and go backwards.

STONE: [crosstalk] now and then go back, yeah. That’s—we’re living through now, this is what we know, but we don’t see past what I call the tyranny of now. We’re buried in details every day, and the events and so forth, and we’re carried on this sail, on this wind.

And that’s the beauty of being able to stop and do something like this with Peter. This huge project starts in the 1940s. Actually, it starts in 1900, and we have two chapters coming out, the prologue. The chapters A and B will be released on DVD in September/October from Warner Brothers in a set, a 12-hour set.

But your question is haunting.

JAY: And this goes back to McKinley, doesn’t it?

STONE: Yeah, it goes back to McKinley and Bryan in the election of 1900, and then it works its way up to the wars.

The First World War is huge. It’s the mother of all wars. It’s the mother of World War II.

But, you know, I asked precisely the same question. When I decided to do this in 2008, I said, I’m 62 years old at that point, and I said, you know, I’m getting to the end of my little passage. I want to know: what was it all about, Oliver? You know, what was the meaning of this thing? ‘Cause it started for me with the atomic bomb. It was ’46, and the week I was born was the week that Wallace, Henry Wallace got fired. It’s kind of an irony, the whole thing at Madison Square Garden.

I was born in New York, but my parents were very much of that optimistic generation of World War II. My father was an officer. And the world was so big and bright, and New York was the center of that world, and I was at it. And I ironically ended up in Vietnam. And my life, as you know somewhat of it—movies, because I suppose I wanted to escape further into illusion.

But all my generation, my cohorts at Yale University, the Hill School, did go on to become the power brokers of my time. Bill Clinton. George Bush was in my class at Yale of ’68. And he was typical of a generation that was entitled and privileged and assumed that America was at the center of the world and we had the right to do what we wanted.

JAY: A generation and a class.

STONE: Yeah, and that right was given to us by the bomb. And no one knows that today, you see. That’s what haunts me. I mean, we know it, but we don’t acknowledge it. And what bothers me, ’cause I guess I was a dramatist, part of what I do is I go into the subconscious of the generation and subconscious of the race and I try to bring out those things that are more primal that are not talked about at cocktail parties.

But I felt in my heart that everything in America changed with the atomic bomb. They gave us the right to do what we wanted to do. And because it was powerful and we had the might on our side, we had the right. We equated might with right, force with the ability to do good. And we carried that forward to this place where we invented our own morality as we went along. We never apologized, we never thought about apologizing for dropping the atomic bombs on Japan. We never thought it was necessary, because we thought it was necessary to end the war.

And the whole story of the saga of my life begins with the climax to World War II is we won the war with the atomic bomb. Japan was defeated. That’s a huge myth, and I think we go into it in elaborate detail. It’s a foundation myth of our society. And I’m trying to address your Obama question, because I was going back to the roots to find out the end.

JAY: Yeah, because this also happens from the Democratic Party.

STONE: Say again?

JAY: It’s the Democratic Party in power that builds the bomb and drops the bomb.

STONE: Yes. Yeah. The Democratic Party, with few exceptions, has basically done a duet with the Republican Party. And the Republican Party, which, by the way, in 1946 is a key year. It’s the first postwar election. The congressional elections of ’46 bring the Republicans steaming back into Washington. There’s an angry edge to this thing against Roosevelt.

And Roosevelt felt it. I think that’s the reason he probably dumped Wallace, or turned on him, ’cause I think he felt the edge of conservatism coming back in ’44, even. All the party bosses and the Democrats were working to get rid of Wallace and replace him with this hack, Harry Truman.

But the Republicans were—the country was scared after the war, too. It was scared about going back into a depression. It was scared about the so-called nuclear—the atomic threats that we had. We’d dropped the bomb on Japan. But we felt—as Edward R. Murrow said, we’d felt a dread about it. There was a dread in the air, but we couldn’t quite place it. The Russians didn’t have the bomb for three more years. But still we were scared, and the Republicans took advantage of that in the elections. So Truman was in a sense also reacting to fear.

Fear has always been predominant in my life—the fear of the bomb, the fear of growing up, the fear of being attacked by the Russians. There was—my father used to speak of the worldwide Russian conspiracy to take over the world. That was bible for me, as was God. I mean, he believed it, and they were the enemy. China was also allied with them, and the Korean War enhanced those fears. And by the time I went to Vietnam, you know, I was a spooked individual, as were many Americans.

But when you go to now, to today, to Mr. Obama, it’s sad because we don’t learn. And that’s why we wrote this book and made this series. We were hoping that people would say, no, this history is a myth that’s been handed to us; this is the real history, and this is what America did in these years. And if we were able to face that truthfully and honestly, like most people who were defeated in war face their truths—the Germans, citizens, faced their German truths; the Japanese citizens faced the Japanese truths. We need—frankly, we needed a huge defeat to learn from. We’ve never met a defeat.

JAY: And as you show the series and you talk to people who voted for President Obama, and in Hollywood many of whom are still very enthusiastic about President Obama, and that whole mindset, this facing the truth of this history, it seems they can’t...

JAY: When you’ve talked to people in Hollywood who are still enthusiastic about President Obama, who somehow rationalize these drone attacks, who can rationalize this NDAA legislation, which is—you know, allows the military to indefinitely intern people, they find ways to rationalize that they are still the good guys, we are still for democracy, we’re the civilizers, we’re the moral ones.

STONE: Everything is backwards. Everything. It’s upside down. And teleologically it’s upside down. It’s like you’re looking through a telescope. But you’re not seeing yourself. It’s like we flip the image, as we do in film. You know, you should put it upside down, take the history, shake it, and put it upside down, to see everything. Take a history student, make him go through the whole thing, have a real debate about this, and take every one of these events from the atomic bomb on—and you have to start with the atomic bomb—in fact, you could start with the whole concept of World War II and who won World War II and what the U.S. role was in World War II.

And if you can have that debate with a student, at least we can be more humble and we can understand that we’re not all bad, but we’re not all good, and we’re not certainly blessed by divinity, and God is not on our side.

JAY: Well, you were saying you grew up believing a lot of this mythology. So when does the coin drop for you?

STONE: Yes, I did. That’s why I think I’m able to—. At the age of 40, when the coin dropped—. People think I went to Vietnam and got radicalized. That’s not the case. I did a movie about a man who did, Ron Kovic, who is a wonderful individual. He came back in a wheelchair and was angry, and I understand why. I was a little dumber, or number, call it, number. I think I was in the middle. It took me several years after returning to—. I was certainly on the fence. I didn’t feel good about Vietnam. But talking to people, educating myself—and I’m coming from a deeply conservative background now, you understand—Republican, Eisenhower, Castro’s the Devil, Kennedy was the Devil, Roosevelt is the arch Satan of all time.

JAY: This was your belief system.

STONE: That was my background. Around 1970s, with the Watergate hearing and the Church Committee, I started to have huge fights with my dad about all this stuff. He always called Vietnam a police action. He hurt my feelings, because I’d been in a lot of combat, and he hurt me when he said, you know, come on, this was nothing like World War II, it was just a police action, like he was trying to shuffle a mistake under the rug, as Korea was shuffled under the rug.

But not to me. It was not a police action. It was a huge—and we know now from the casualties and the amount of Vietnamese killed that it was a massive, massive war, a dirty, dirty war.

And then—but only about 1980s—I’m that slow. You have to bear with me. I mean, I’m on the fence. I believe all the Church thing. I’m horrified by the CIA, the coups.

Around 1980, Reagan gets elected. I’m still supporting Reagan, believe it or not, because Carter, my perception—I believe the media, I believe that he had made a mess, and I thought that Reagan could straighten it out. So I go down to 1984, to Central America with Richard Boyle to make Salvador, and all of a sudden I have this kind of strange flashbacks, ’cause I’m seeing American soldiers in the streets of Honduras in Tegucigalpa, men and women now in uniform, young, looked like me in Vietnam, and they’re telling me the same story about they’re here, you know, to—because the communists are next-door in Nicaragua and they’re going to come on—basically, Reagan is saying they’re going to cross the border, they’re going to—the Russians are supplying them, the Cubans are supplying them. And I know by now this is all horseshit. I go to Salvador, I go to Honduras, I go to Guatemala, which is a nightmare of death squads, and Reagan is—seems to me—all of a sudden I see him in a different light. I come back. I do Salvador movie, which I don’t know if you’ve seen, but it’s certainly—

JAY: Yeah.

STONE: —a progressive view of Salvador.

JAY: Very. I was about to say one wouldn’t have thought that filmmaker had come from those Cold War ideas.

STONE: Well, it was coming from the abuse of the peasantry, of the impoverished classes. It was in Vietnam, and Central America was the same thing to me. And I felt for those people, made that movie.

And from then on, at the age of 40—I mean, it’s late in my life. I started to really reexamine this thing, and slowly, because every one of those films—JFK, Nixon, the Vietnam movies—took me to another place of research. And I got front line research in Washington—Nixon, all that stuff, JFK.

I was shocked on the JFK situation, ’cause we were trying to deal honestly with transparency in transparent government. I was shocked that the conservative movement in this country so attacked that movie, ’cause it seemed to me the conservatives would be lining up with us. Goldwater would have said, let’s have transparency, let’s find out what happened. There was no desire to find out. And so the media all of a sudden became more of my enemy than ever, because they were attacking me on a broad front with JFK for having falsified history.

So I kept going in this direction. And by 2008, when I made W., which was my attempt to do the George Bush presidency on this vein of humor because it was so outrageous—satire, so to speak—that was what we were seeing.

I had decided I have to go beyond that now and, for my children, do something bigger, more definitive, and try to deal with the whole thing I have seen from 1940s to now. And Peter Kuznick’s story of Henry Wallace being kicked off the ticket in ’44 ties in very ironically to the atomic bomb. So if you want to talk about the atomic bomb, we thought that would be the entry point—go back to Wallace, takes us to the bomb story, takes us to the Truman candidacy. And that takes us into the Cold War.

JAY: Alright. Well, thanks very much.

STONE: Thank you.

JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

-"Oliver Stone’s Journey from Cold Warrior to America’s Untold History," The Real News Network, April 8, 2013

[scottguy]

Article: NC Newspaper Blasts Trump Over Falsehoods About Fed Response to Helene

NC Newspaper Blasts Trump Over Falsehoods About Fed Response to Helene

Speaking truth to power.

I wonder how MAGAs in North and South Carolina feel about being lied to by their hero Trump in their hour of crisis and need?

[disruptiveempathy]

The Israeli bombing of a residential neighborhood in Beirut is also a war crime.

[cynicalclassicist]

And the Trumpists look on this with glee. Those in jail are dehumanised and their deaths seen as an inherent good.

he Trump administration has created a human rights crisis with its draconian, made-for-TV campaign of mass deportation. As arrests ramp up across the country, three people died inside immigration jails and detention centers in April alone, bringing the total number of people to die in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody since Trump returned to office to at least seven, according to the Detention Watch Network and media reports.

Brayan Garzón-Rayo, a 27-year-old man from Colombia who lived with his family in St. Louis, died on April 8 at the Phelps County Jail in Missouri, where the local sheriff contracts with ICE to incarcerate immigrants. Nhon Nguc Nguyen, 55, from Vietnam, died on April 16 after spending two months in ICE custody. He was being held at the El Paso Processing Center in Texas.

Democrats in Congress are demanding answers following the death of Marie Ange Blaise, a 44-year-old citizen of Haiti, who died on April 25 at the Broward Transitional Center in Pompano Beach, Florida, after several weeks of being shuffled between immigration jails in Louisiana, Florida and Puerto Rico.

[petits-moutons-noirs]

abolish the courts

founded on safe-guarding chattel slavery in the US colony, the supreme court and it’s membership are not just.

[riseuptimes]

Biden Says He’s “Practically” Declared Climate Emergency — But He Hasn’t

[thetarttfuldickhead]

Coach Beard has a secret Traitors Club. It consists of himself, Nate and Jamie, ie people who have (at least in the opinion of one Willis Beard) betrayed Ted Lasso – but who have also learned the error of their ways through the goodness of Ted’s gentle heart.

(Yes, yes, you might argue that Jamie’s insulting remarks about Ted in 1x10 is a reasonable reaction to what, from Jamie’s POV, looks like Ted unreasonably dumping him, but a, I’m not sure that Beard knows that, and b, I’m not sure that Beard cares about that. You might also argue that Nate and Jamie have both learned a lot of stuff from people other than Ted, but: see the a and b of the previous sentence. And anyway, this is Beard’s club and you don’t get a say in his absurd selection criteria.)

Beard doesn’t inform anyone of the club’s existence. That includes the other members, Nate and Jamie, who just suddenly finds themselves regularly invited out for drinks with the most mysterious man either of them have ever met.

There are a lot of weird but oddly good talks about feelings. There are silences neither Jamie nor Nate know what to do with. And then there’s the football strategy chatter, which unites them all in a wild and eager frenzy, and an unexpected but pleasant sense of shared understanding.

Nate think it’s nice that Beard wants to hang and he’s not one to look a gift horse in the mouth anyway, so he doesn’t question the set-up. Jamie generally assumes that given the choice anyone would always choose to hang with him always, so. He’ll indulge his coach. They have a shared love of trivia.

Eventually Beard learns of Rebecca’s early transgressions, and (secretely) inducts her into the secret club. Club meetings get a whole lot more interesting from there on out.

[memecucker]

“This latest bill is part of a continued effort by the [California] Legislative Jewish Caucus to impose ideological constraints upon ethnic studies as a field to disallow the critical teaching of Palestine within K-12 education in California,” Christine Hong, a professor of critical race and ethnic studies at the University of California (UC) Santa Cruz and co-chair of the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council (UCESFC) told Truthout.

While AB 1468’s authors are Democrats who have condemned the Trump administration’s attacks on public education, Lara Kiswani, executive director of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), said the proposed bill would have similar effects as efforts in Republican-controlled states and on the federal level seeking to whitewash K-12 and college curricula and turn back the clock on civil rights progress.

“The Democrats and others who are championing these bills may not explicitly say themselves or even identify as part of the far right MAGA agenda, but it’s indisputable that what they are doing is in alignment with the broader attack on public education and the attack on anti-racist education, in particular,” Kiswani told Truthout.

AB 1468’s lead sponsor is the Jewish Public Affairs Committee of California (JPAC), one pillar of whose policy framework is to “maintain a strong California-Israel relationship,” including through “combat[ing] campaigns to delegitimize and demonize Israel.” JPAC lists the Anti-Defamation League and other Zionist organizations among its members.

Last year, members of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus proposed a raft of bills meant to stifle Palestine-related speech in public schools and on college campuses. Among those was AB 2918, a predecessor to AB 1468. When a diverse coalition of educators and advocates mounted a pressure campaign and succeeded in having it shelved, sponsors vowed to reintroduce it this year. “AB 1468 is AB 2918, but on steroids,” Guadalupe Cardona, a high school educator and member of the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium, told Truthout.

The new bill would require all ethnic studies curricula, instruction and instructional materials to undergo public hearings, be vetted by the state, and be posted on the Department of Education’s website. AB 1468 also outlines standards according to which ethnic studies materials should be reviewed, including mandating that instruction focus on “domestic experience and stories” and not cover “abstract ideological theories, causes, or pedagogies.”

In the proposed legislation, “there are so many layers of policing and surveillance that no other academic area has,” Tricia Gallagher-Geurtsen, co-chair of the San Diego Unified School District Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee and a lecturer in critical race and ethnic studies at UC Santa Cruz, told Truthout. “It’s absolutely unprecedented overreach, and it’s an arm of the state trying to censor what our children are learning [and] censor the truth of our students’ realities.”

Under AB 1468, the body responsible for vetting ethnic studies materials would be the California State Board of Education’s Instructional Quality Commission, whose current members include Sen. Ben Allen and Anita Friedman. Friedman is a board trustee of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and executive director of Jewish Family and Children’s Services, an organization known for its efforts to silence discussions of Palestine and anti-Zionism in schools.

[back-and-totheleft]

"I'm not a historian and don't pretend to be"

Q. Talking about cruelty, we saw the cruelty of the Japanese army in Nagasaki – exhibits of the Nanjing Massacre, military sex slavery, and Unit 731 at the Oka Masaharu Museum.[9] The US too, even after its use of the atomic bomb, used cruel weapons such as Agent Orange, depleted uranium weapons, cluster bombs, and drones. The nature of war is cruel, but in the case of the US, it seems rampant. Is there any historical significance in this cruelty of the United States?

Stone: I do not believe that the United States was as cruel as Germany and Japan were. I mean I was in Vietnam; I saw Agent Orange dropped on us many times. I still do not know. Maybe I am going to be a victim of it. I do not think about it that much, but I know people have claimed they had been. We saw the results with the Vietnamese. Agent Orange was the cruelest we became. Although we developed mustard gas in WWI, we never used it. The atomic bomb and Agent Orange were the worst. When Obama talks about Syria and he says that the red line for Syria is chemical weapons, what a fucking hypocrite! Why doesn’t he look at our own history? He probably would not even admit that we used chemical weapons in Vietnam. And we made a big deal about Saddam Hussein’s having used chemical weapons when we were trying to justify invading Iraq. (Kuznick: But when Saddam used them against the Iranians, we initially ran interference for him at the UN, preempting a resolution explicitly condemning the Iraqi use. He was our ally. And after he used them against Iraq’s own Kurdish people at Halabjah in 1988, the U.S. increased aid to his vile regime.) So who makes money off this? Dow Chemical profited immensely in Vietnam, but the students drove their recruiters off campus. But cruelty, no; cruelty is not human nature. There are always cruel soldiers in every country in the world, people who are racist, people who are stupid. But as a policy, the United States. . . , take waterboarding. We do it, but we always back away from it, whereas you have to admit that the Germans and the Japanese wholeheartedly embraced cruelty for many years. If they had been winners in WWⅡ, we would be experiencing Unit 731 in Manchuria. [...]

Q: Japan faces debate over historical issues such as the Nanjing Massacre and military sex slavery, and when we try to deal with these issues honestly we are called anti-Japanese. Do you get such reaction too as being called anti-American or unpatriotic? How do you deal with such criticism?

Stone: I think the strongest credential I can put forward would be, number one, my service in the military in Vietnam, which is hard for them to get around. John McCain can bluster all he wants, but at the end of the day, he was a bomber; he bombed people from the air and he knows that. I do not understand the man’s mentality, how, after being in the prison camp like he was, he can still have such anger and hatred in his heart for the perceived enemies of the United States, possibly soon including China. McCain is what I would call an unreconstructed, un-evolved soldier; many of them exist. I, on the other hand, feel good about my mission…because I served honorably. To be honest, I mean it was not an honorable war, but I served honorably within the confines of my own understanding of the war. And at the end of the day, I became a warrior for peace, which is what I am now, not a warrior for more wars, so I feel strong about that.

And number two, I think what is very important for me is that I did not speak out until I had made roughly eighteen feature films. I spoke as a dramatist, which is my profession. I am not a historian, and I do not pretend to be. I do not have the grounding in it, but I do care about history and I can dramatize it well. Now as I speak out as a documentarian with a background of having made movies, I get criticized very often for nonsense reasons, rubbish reasons. The way they threw it at me was that I made up history, and it took me a while to understand it. Many dramatists have used history before me and I do not apologize for doing historical drama. I never once claimed that I was doing a documentary, and I was not doing a documentary, never, and they put words in my mouth. Anyway, that is why I feel that I can talk strongly without feeling shame.

-Oliver Stone, "“We Used Chemical Weapons in Vietnam”: Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick Explain How Telling the Untold History Can Change the World for the Better," By Satoko Oka Norimatsu & Narusawa Muneo, Truthout, Oct 6 2013