What is happening in Gaza is not new. Misguided religious beliefs and simmering, deeply entrenched racism each play a role in creating the conditions for genocide. In many cases, violence is perpetrated by one ethnic group upon another based solely on religious affiliation. In Cambodia, organized religion was considered a threat to civil order, and […]
According to J. Samuel Walker in Prompt & Utter Destruction, the five fundamental considerations which led to the use of the atomic bomb grew out of circumstances that existed in the summer of 1945, when an especially brutal island-by-island military offensive was still being waged in the Pacific. The battle of Okinawa had sacrificed tens […]
Federalist Paper #10 is a continuation of Federalist Paper #9, entitled, The Utility of the Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection, in which James Madison argues for the need of a successful Union to “break the control and violence of faction.” According to Madison, these factions are “diseases” born of dangerous vices. […]
According to “Publius” in The Federalist Papers, a faction is “A number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or a majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the […]
As the Commander in Chief, the President has the ability to send US armed forces into combat without Congressional approval – as long as he informs Congress within 48 hours – like former President George W. Bush did when he authorized the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. Another formal power granted to the President […]
Civil Rights and civil liberties: a discussion that begins and ends with the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights was a noble, pyrrhic attempt to limit the “tyranny of the national government,” however it says nothing about limiting state’s rights. An individual state’s ability to ignore or refuse to legally implement federal laws is […]
The framers of the Constitution were all white, wealthy landowners who had no problem with the idea of human slavery, or various other forms of oppression. Women and white men who owned no property were excluded from what were supposed to be our “inalienable rights.” Voting and equal protections provided in The Constitution were given […]
I sat down to dinner recently with the family of one of my oldest and dearest friends. His sister came with her husband and their two young sons. Somehow the state of healthcare in America came up. The eldest son, speaking on behalf of his moron father – ex-Navy – stated emphatically that healthcare is […]
No one can be truly powerful unless he has access to the command of major institutions, for it is over these institutional means of power that the truly powerful are, in the first instance, truly powerful. -C. Wright Mills Author David Talbot makes a convincing case for the existence of an extremely powerful, utterly sociopathic […]
I read Friendly Fascism back in the early eighties, at the very start of the Reagan era. I decided to pick it up again recently to see how far we’ve come since then, and it’s amazing just how spot on author Bertram Gross was in his cogent analysis of elite power structures in America. Reading […]
Jason Darensburg's Blog-o-rama 