"Dizzy With Success." That was the phrase used by Stalin to describe the "few excesses" that had taken place in the "historic drive to collectivization," i.e., the Bolshevik war on the rural poor that had led to massive famine and the deaths and uprooting of millions of people. The campaign had left such a swathe of ruin that some of those who saw its effects went mad, or turned dissident, or subsided into horrified, soul-drained silence. "Dizzy With Success" would be also be an apt description for the epochal ruin that has been visited on the people of Afghanistan in

 Our guest blogger today is Dr. Robert Dylan (Princeton, St Andrews) who in a passage written a few years ago, about another historical epoch (viz., the antebellum and Civil War eras), expresses what we believe are some pertinent, prescient observations about the contemporary scene: After awhile, you become aware of nothing but a culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, evil for evil, the common destiny of the human being getting thrown off course."

  American policy, at the highest levels of state, is specifically and deliberately designed to kill, despoil, dispossess, insult and outrage Muslims, in operations all over the world. That’s what the Terror War is all about. We have spent more than $3 trillion burning Korans — and their readers — in the last decade. This policy has been pushed, championed and cheered by virtually the entire bipartisan political and media establishments — and by much of the religious establishment as well. Yet this week we have been treated to the bleakly comic sight of the avatars of these very establishments

Below we present a short film by the up-and-coming transatlantic auteur Avalon Floyd, with musical accompaniment by a down-and-fading obscurity, singing one of those geometric doxologies just like they did in days of yore.  

UPDATE BELOW. Days are grim, nights are hard, the road keeps spiraling down … let’s lighten our load for just a while. Imagine leaving something like that off your album …. !   UPDATE: Oh dear, it looks like our party got raided by the Web Sheriff! I suggest you click on the video anyway, then drop down to the little number in the line-up below by the unfortunately late and immensely great Doug Sahm, and let’s carry on….

Mullah Omar of Afghanistan must have been one of the last people in the world with a deep, abiding faith in the lawfulness of the American government. Certainly, the American people had long been accustomed to – and largely approving of – their government bending, twisting and breaking the rule of law, especially in matters of foreign policy and “national security.” And of course, the millions of people around the world on the receiving end of invasions, subversions and coercions from the Potomac potentates were well aware of America’s infinitely elastic notions of law. Yet in the days after 9/11,

For your consideration: two stories, from opposite sides of the world, concerning the attitude of Power toward those who would question its wisdom: GI’s mental health questioned in WikiLeaks case (AP) China accused of holding woman in mental hospital for challenging officials (Guardian) The GI in question is, of course, Bradley Manning, the young soldier charged with leaking the video of American gunships killing civilians in Iraq, and suspected of involvement in passing thousands of war-related secret documents to Wikileaks. Manning has been quoted by friends (and the false friend who betrayed him to the authorities) about his motives for

On Tuesday night, Barack Obama gave a speech from the Oval Office on Iraq that was almost as full of hideous, murderous lies as the speech on Iraq his predecessor gave in the same location more than seven years ago. After mendaciously declaring an "end to the combat mission in Iraq" — where almost 50,000 regular troops and a similar number of mercenaries still remain, carrying out the same missions they have been doing for years — Obama delivered what was perhaps the most egregious, bitterly painful lie of the night: "Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the

(UPDATED BELOW) We hear a lot about barbarism and backwardness and bloodthirstiness among the nations of the Middle East, where violent religious extremists are praised and supported — and often hold state power. A lot of this is hype and misinformation, of course, but sometimes it’s all too true. From the Guardian: An Israeli army officer who fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was acquitted on all charges by a military court yesterday. … The soldier,