Luminous Landmark As we noted here recently, Arthur Silber is in the midst of a landmark series on the Wikilieaks revelations — a series whose profound implications and insights extend far beyond the particulars of the current controversy (although he has many pertinent things to say about those as well). I’m sure I will be drawing on these essays in the days to come. Circumstances prevent me from doing them justice at the moment, so for now I just want to point you to them once again (several more have appeared since their first mention here), and urge you to

I noted here a couple of weeks ago that I was looking "forward to seeing more of the genuine revelations of heretofore undisclosed crimes that will likely be emerging from the still largely unexplored documents" released by Wikileaks last month. I have not been disappointed. (I’ve also been in the process of revising much of my first reaction to the document dump; but more on that later perhaps.) As the media froth surrounding the initial appearance of the documents recedes, the nuggets of hard truth become clearer, with diligent researchers digging through the trove. For example, Bretigne Shaffer finds some

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In two recent posts (here and here), Arthur Silber provides a different and fruitful perspective on the Wikileaks document dump, one that looks beyond the specific content of the revelations and their presentation by the media and political establishments, which were the concern of my recent post on the matter. In his posts, Silber speaks to the efficacy of the example of active personal opposition to the hideously brutal and destructive structures of power. As he notes in one of the pieces: If you were to tell me that you could demonstrate that Assange is nothing more than an opportunistic

In the first year of his presidency, the first year of the "hope and change" he promised to bring to the conduct of American affairs, Barack Obama countenanced — and abetted — a coup in Honduras that ousted a mildly reformist, democratically elected president and replaced him with a clique of thuggish elites who now rule, illegitimately, through repression, threat and outright murder. Since the installation of these throwbacks to the corrupt and brutal ‘banana republics’ of yore, Obama’s secretary of state, the "progressive" Hillary Clinton, has spent a good deal of time and effort trying to coerce Honduras’ outraged

(Updated and revised.) (Updated and revised again, Tuesday, July 27) “I am shocked — shocked! — to find gambling is going on in here” — Captain Renault at the gaming tables in Casablanca. The much ballyhooed dump of intelligence and diplomatic files concerning the Afghan War has been trumpeted as some kind of shocking expose, “painting a different picture” than the official version of events — revelations that are sure to rock the Anglo-American political establishments to their foundations. The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel were given 92,000 reports by Wikileaks, including thousands of pages of raw

Years ago, I wrote about the use of chemical weapons in the American assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004. I was attacked at the time for my "wild accusations" by many people, across the political spectrum, even by stalwart dissidents, who felt that such "exaggerations" undermined the "effectiveness" of the anti-war movement, preventing it from being taken "seriously" by the "serious" players in the power structure. Later, of course, American military officials — and serving soldiers — admitted using white phosphorus and other chemical weapons in the assault. Over the years, small-scale medical studies have pointed to

News from Blighty: the disparity in death rates between the well-off and the poor in the UK  is now greater than at any time since 1921. The London Review of Books points to a new study by the British Medical Journal that shows that by 2007, “for every 100 people under the age of 65 dying in the best-off areas, 199 were dying in the poorest tenth of areas.” The Journal study said that the data suggest “it was only prolonged and enthusiastic state intervention” that kept the disparity from being greater. On the other hand, the elite-coddling market jihadism

Henry Miller once said that the purpose of the artist is to “inoculate the world with disillusionment.” We are in desperate need of disillusionment today — disillusionment on a vast scale, disillusionment as a constant discipline. Arthur Silber is one of the greatest such artists now at work, and he has just released a remarkable piece aimed at one the deadliest illusions of our time: the myth of American Exceptionalism. I cannot recommend strongly enough that you read the entire piece, but below are a few excerpts to highlight some of the salient points. Silber writes of the poisonous effects