Christian Sorensen's ambitious Understanding the War Industry documents the US war economy with zest. It's a dull, monotonous topic but vitally important, and he manages to make it interesting. You ...
Peace and Socialism
Review of Sorensen, Understanding the War Industry (2020): Declaring war on war
- Written by Eric Walberg Эрик Вальберг/ Уолберг إيريك والبرغ
Coronavirus: squabbling in our WWI trenches
- Written by Eric Walberg Эрик Вальберг/ Уолберг إيريك والبرغ
Although covid-19 exact origins are still in dispute, it appears to be another case of the virus jumping from the animal kingdom into humans, like the bird flu or swine flu. It is almost certain it was a bat virus ingested by pangolins and passed on to humans, as Chinese medicine prizes pangolin scales (it is the only scaled mammal). It’s flesh is also prized.
Like hundreds of other extracts in Chinese medicine, this is based on unscientific, magical theory that you gain powers ingesting the beast you want to emulate. Bear bile is another prized medicine, though the active ingredient has been synthesized and there is no reason to torture bears to get it. Why this perverse fascination with destroying Nature?
A hidden positive effect of Corvid-19 is the immediate ban in China of such trade in wild life, where 900,000 pangolins were ground up and/or eaten last year. In February 2020, the Chinese government passed a law "prohibiting the illegal wildlife trade, abolishing the bad habit of overconsumption of wildlife, and effectively protecting the lives and health of the people."
Leaving EU was right move for wrong reasons
- Written by Eric Walberg Эрик Вальберг/ Уолберг إيريك والبرغ
Let's be clear: the EU was not set up to promote a friendly big socialist community, a Soviet-lite. The EU was created by the US, originally the European Coal and Steel Community set up in 1950 with the intent of promoting European integration, approved by Truman as a Cold War anti-domino measure. The chief method of promoting compliance with the US-sponsored post-war order was through provision of aid. The Marshall Plan (1948) was the vehicle for Europe, aid tied to the purchase of US goods and services, effectively subsidizing the US balance of payments.
The main international organs created at the time to regulate international economic matters—the World Bank, the IMF, GATT—and the Marshall Plan for European reconstruction were rejected by the Soviet Union as part of US imperial plans. Which of course they were, since it is only rational that the US as chief architect of the post-war international system would set rules which would allow it to win. The US Senate rejected US participation in the British-designed League of Nations, rightly seeing it as an infringement on US sovereignty, but voted 89–2 for membership in the clearly US-controlled UN in 1945.
Diana Johnstone, Circle in the Darkness: Memoir of a World Watcher (2020)
- Written by Eric Walberg Эрик Вальберг/ Уолберг إيريك والبرغ
First, Diana Johnstone’s memoir is a classic, and will be read and quoted as long as we keep struggling for peace and justice. It is one of the great personal accounts of the anguished decline of our uncivilization, both a riveting eye-witness account of many of the horrors and perfidies, and a primer for students of history and all those struggling to not only dismantle the beast, but to prepare us for what follows it.
Read it and weep. And smile at the follies. And shout ‘Yes!’ as light bulbs flash in your mind.
Johnstone’s concern in Circle in the Darkness Is not so much ‘the lived experience of the transitory nature’ of things but ‘especially of the moral environment.’ She was blessed to to begin at the beginning of the end. At the empire’s undisputed zenith under FDR. And though not a card-carrying anything religious or left wing, she grabbed that blessing and stoked and nurtured it, creating her life, her jobs, a single mother raising a daughter in Minnesota and then France, seeing through the cant everywhere and using her only weapon, the pen, to expose it.
It is a frightening, unremittingly gruesome, Dantesque journey, but Johnstone’s steady moral compass sees us through and is uplifting.
Toronto Wet'suwet'en Solidarity March
- Written by Eric Walberg Эрик Вальберг/ Уолберг إيريك والبرغ
February 22, 2020. The sun was brilliant, the slogans and posters striking, the round dance in the heart of Canada's financial district, the 6 concentric circles of the real Canadians, those who honour Canada's First Nations, made February 22, 2020 a historic occasion. The largest show of native solidarity in Canada's history, the day was celebrated across the country. Here are a few memories courtesy of my cell phone.
And here's my take on Presstv https://urmedium.com/c/presstv/8292 I'm on at 3:30.
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