BBC News regularly proclaims its supposed editorial principles of fearless, independent, impartial, fair and accurate journalism. In a January 2023 speech to the Whitehall & Industry Group in London, then BBC Chairman Richard Sharp boasted that BBC journalism is the ‘global gold standard’ of credible news reporting.

Two years previously, in 2021, the public broadcaster had proudly published a focused, 10-point plan to ensure the protection of the highest ‘impartiality, whistleblowing and editorial standards’. BBC director general Tim Davie asserted:

‘The BBC’s editorial values of impartiality, accuracy and trust are the foundation of our relationship with audiences in the UK and around the world. Our audiences deserve and expect programmes and content which earn their trust every day and we must meet the highest standards and hold ourselves accountable in everything we do.’

When it comes to the broadcaster’s coverage of Gaza since October 2023, and long before, BBC audiences have seen for themselves the hollowness of such BBC rhetoric.

For example, the BBC’s withdrawal of its own commissioned powerful documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, earlier this year epitomised how much the UK’s national broadcaster bends to the will of the Israel lobby. The BBC dropped the documentary from iPlayer, soon after it was broadcast on BBC Two on 17 February, when it emerged that the film’s narrator, 13-year-old Abdullah al-Yazuri, is the son of Ayman al-Yazuri, a deputy minister of agriculture in Gaza’s government which is administered by Hamas. The film was withdrawn after a campaign by pro-Israel voices, including David Collier, a self-described ‘100 per cent Zionist’ activist, Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s ambassador to the UK, and Danny Cohen, a former director of BBC television, who said that the broadcaster ‘is at risk of becoming a Hamas propaganda mouthpiece.’

Another documentary, Gaza: Medics Under Fire, made by Oscar-nominated, Emmy and Peabody award-winning filmmakers, including Ben de Pear, Karim Shah and Ramita Navai, has been held back by the BBC, even though it had been signed off by BBC lawyers. The film includes the testimony of Palestinian doctors working in Gaza under Israeli bombardment. It has been ready for broadcast since February after months of editorial reviews and fact-checking.

Over 600 prominent figures from the arts and media, including British film director Mike Leigh, Oscar-winning actor Susan Sarandon and Lindsey Hilsum, the international editor of Channel 4 News, have signed an open letter criticising the BBC for withholding the documentary:

‘We stand with the medics of Gaza whose voices are being silenced. Their urgent stories are being buried by bureaucracy and political censorship. This is not editorial caution. It’s political suppression. The BBC has provided no timeline, no transparency. Such decisions reinforce the systemic devaluation of Palestinian lives in our media.’

This, of course, is all part of an endemic pattern of BBC bias towards Israel under the guise of ‘impartiality’; a façade that has now been obliterated. The corporation’s longstanding, blatant protection of Israel, considered an ‘apartheid regime’ by major human rights organisations, has been particularly glaring since Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist government ordered genocidal attacks on Gaza in October 2023.

The public has been subject to repetition and amplification of the Israeli narrative above the Palestinian perspective. Moreover, the broadcaster regularly omits ‘Israel’ from headlines about its latest war crimes committed in Gaza and the West Bank. Another remarkable feature of the BBC’s performance has been the dismissive treatment by senior BBC management of serious concerns about bias raised by their own journalists. A very brief summary of the BBC’s biased reporting on Gaza, and criticism by some of their own journalists, can be found in this thread on X. The essential conclusion concerning BBC News coverage of Gaza, wrote one dissident BBC journalist, is that of:

‘a collapse in the application of basic standards and norms of journalism that seems aligned with Israel’s propaganda strategy.’ [Our emphasis]

BBC management have ignored or dismissed ‘a mass of evidence-based critique of coverage’ from members of staff. So much for the BBC’s claimed commitment to taking whistleblowers seriously.

Karishma Patel, a former BBC researcher, newsreader and journalist, wrote earlier this year about her reasons for leaving the BBC. She observed ‘a shocking level of editorial inconsistency’ in how the BBC covers Gaza. Journalists were ‘actively choosing not to follow evidence’ of Israeli war crimes ‘out of fear’.

In a follow-up article last month, she observed that:

‘many [BBC] journalists are afraid to speak their minds – to challenge editorial decisions or speak freely to powerful presenters and executives. This isn’t a newsroom environment conducive to robust journalism – a profession all about the pursuit of truth and accountability.’

She added:

‘It’s important the public understands how far editorial policy can be silently shaped by even the possibility of anger from certain groups, foreign governments, our own government, mega-corporations – any powerful actor – and how crucial it is that more junior journalists who see it can speak up.’

‘A Precious National Asset’

Last week, the BBC’s director general warned of a disinformation ‘trust crisis’ that was putting ‘the social fabric’ of the UK ‘at risk’. Tim Davie pointed the finger at social media platforms such as TikTok and YouTube where, as a Guardian report on Davie’s speech put it, ‘disinformation can go unchecked’. We have previously written (for example, here and here) about how ‘mainstream’ editors and journalists love to point at social media as prime purveyors of disinformation, diverting attention from their own culpability in much larger crimes of state-approved propaganda that fuels wars, the erosion of democracy and climate catastrophe.

Davie said:

‘The future of our cohesive, democratic society feels for the first time in my life at risk.’

He called for ‘strong government backing’ for the BBC as a ‘precious national asset’ to be ‘properly funded and supported’. The fact that the BBC has itself massively contributed to a ‘trust crisis’ in disinformation and propaganda, encapsulated by its complicity in Israel’s genocide, went unmentioned, of course.

The late, great journalist John Pilger put it succinctly in an interview with Afshin Rattansi:

‘The BBC has the most brilliant production values, it produces the most extraordinary natural history and drama series. But the BBC is, and has long been, the most refined propaganda service in the world.’

Daily examples abound of why the public should regard BBC News with deep scepticism. On 12 May, BBC News at Ten reported the release of US-Israeli dual citizen Edan Alexander by Hamas. Senior BBC reporter Lucy Williamson said that Alexander had originally been ‘kidnapped as a soldier’. The terminology is deceptive: civilians are kidnapped; soldiers are captured. Why did BBC editors approve this loaded use of the wrong word, ‘kidnapped’?

Consider another example. Richard Sanders, an experienced journalist and documentary filmmaker, noted via X on 15 May that the BBC had included this line in one of its news bulletins:

‘Israel says a hospital [in Gaza] along with a university and schools … have become terrorist strongholds for Hamas’.

Sanders commented:

‘The BBC knows such statements are untrue. Yet that sentence took up more than a third of its 22 sec 7.30 am news bulletin on Gaza – with no rebuttal.’

He added:

‘8am they go to [BBC] correspondent Yolande Knell for a lengthier report. She repeats exactly the same sentence – again, with no rebuttal.

‘The listener is left with the entirely false impression it’s perfectly possible it’s true.

‘Bad, bad journalism.’

And yet this is standard BBC ‘journalism’: the ‘global gold standard’, remember.

Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, is supposedly an exemplar of this gold standard. But his capitulation to the Israel lobby is repeatedly apparent in his interviews and articles. Media activist Saul Staniforth captured this clip where a BBC presenter said to Bowen:

‘[Netanyahu is] looking for other countries to take in Gazans’.

Bowen responded: ‘Well, that’s called…’

He then paused momentarily and continued: ‘… that will be called, by Palestinians and by a lot of people around the world, ethnic cleansing.’

Bowen presumably stopped himself simply stating the truth: ‘that’s called ethnic cleansing.’ This is what he would have said in any context involving an Official Enemy, such as Russia, rather than the Official Friend, Israel.

Jonathan Cook dissected an even more egregious example of Bowen’s favouring the Israeli perspective when the BBC journalist interviewed Philippe Lazzarini, head of United Nations refugee agency UNRWA. Before airing the interview, Bowen introduced the Lazzarini interview with a contorted cautionary statement:

‘Israel says he is a liar, and that his organisation has been infiltrated by Hamas. But I felt it was important to talk to him for a number of reasons.

‘First off, the British government deals with him, and funds his organisation. Which is the largest dealing with Palestinian refugees. They know a lot of what is going on, so therefore I think it is important to speak to people like him.’

As Cook observed, Bowen would never preface an interview with Netanyahu in a similar way:

‘The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister, accusing him of crimes against humanity. But I felt it was important to talk to him for a number of reasons.’

During the interview, Lazzarini told Bowen that he was running out of words ‘to describe the misery and the tragedy affecting the people in Gaza. They have been now more than two months without any aid’. The UNRWA chief added:

‘Starvation is spreading, people are exhausted, people are hungry… we can expect that in the coming weeks if no aid is coming in, that people will not die because of the bombardment, but they will die because of the lack of food. This is the weaponisation of humanitarian aid.’

Cook noted:

‘Lazzarini’s remarks on the catastrophe in Gaza should be seen as self-evident. But Bowen and the BBC undermined his message by framing him and his organisation as suspect – and all because Israel, a criminal state starving the people of Gaza, has made an entirely unfounded allegation against the organisation trying to stop its crimes against humanity.’

He continued:

‘This is the same pattern of smears from Israel that has claimed all 36 hospitals in Gaza are Hamas “command and control centres” – again without a shred of evidence – to justify it bombing them all, leaving Gaza’s population without any meaningful health care system as malnutrition and starvation take hold.’ [Our emphasis]

As Cook pointed out, it is quite possible that it was not Bowen’s choice ‘to attach such a disgraceful disclaimer to his interview. We all understand that he is under enormous pressure, both from within the BBC and outside.’ But just imagine the huge moral standing and public impact it would have if Bowen resigned from the BBC, citing the intolerable pressure not to speak the full truth about Israel’s genocide and war crimes.

For those with long memories, recall the exceptional courage and honesty when two senior UN officials, Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, resigned in 1998 and 2000, respectively, rather than continue to administer the ‘genocidal’ (their term) UN sanctions against Iraq that had led to the deaths of up to 1.5 million people, including around half a million children under the age of five.

One of the most insidious forms of ‘bad’ BBC ‘journalism’ is propaganda by omission, as we have noted in media alerts over the years (for example, see here and here). On 13 May, the investigative news organisation, DropSite, reported that Israeli troops had shot and killed Mohammed Bardawil, a 12-year-old boy. He was one of only four surviving eyewitnesses of the Israeli military’s execution of 15 paramedics, rescue workers and UN staff in Rafah, Gaza, in March 2025.

DropSite noted:

‘Mohammed had testified that some of the paramedics were shot at point-blank range – “from one meter away.” He was also interviewed by The New York Times for their investigation into the massacre, though his most damning claims were omitted from their final report.’

DropSite added:

‘Mohammed had been scheduled for a second round of testimony with investigators, this time with pediatric psychologists present. Instead, the 12-year-old war crime witness was killed by Israeli forces.’

At the time of writing, it is unclear whether he was specifically targeted in an attack, or caught up in an Israeli raid.

This shocking news has been blanked by the BBC, as far as we can see from searching its website. Indeed, our search of the Nexis newspaper database reveals not a single mention in any UK newspaper.

Imagine if Russia had executed fifteen Red Cross medics, first responders and a UN staff member in Ukraine, burying them in a mass grave along with their vehicles, including an ambulance.

Imagine if Russia had lied about this appalling war crime, as proved by footage recovered from the telephone of one of the executed victims.

Imagine if a 12-year-old Ukrainian witness to this Russian war crime was later shot dead by Russian soldiers. His killing would have been major headline news around the world and serious questions would have been asked.

The Fiction of BBC ‘Transparency’

As mentioned, BBC editors love to proclaim their accountability to the public and transparency of their editorial processes. How, then, would they explain their secrecy in holding private meetings with one of Israel’s former top military officers during Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza?

Declassified UK is a small publicly-funded independent news organisation that runs rings around BBC News, and the rest of the ‘mainstream’ media, on UK foreign policy and the impact of British military and intelligence agencies on human rights and the environment. Declassified UK reported earlier this year that BBC, Guardian and Financial Times editors had secret meetings with Israeli General Aviv Kohavi one month after the Gaza bombardment began.

In attendance were Katherine Viner, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, Richard Burgess, director of news content at the BBC, and Roula Khalaf, editor of the Financial Times. According to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Kohavi’s itinerary also included meetings with Sky News chairman David Rhodes at the Israeli embassy, and then shadow foreign secretary David Lammy, between 7 and 9 November 2023.

Kohavi had only stepped down from running Israel’s military months earlier. According to Declassified UK’s investigation, Kohavi had subsequently been ‘tasked with cultivating support for Israel as it escalated its brutal military offensive in Gaza.’

A journalist who was working for the BBC at the time of the visit told Declassified UK:

‘I don’t recall any internal correspondence about the meeting, which the BBC would ordinarily send out if there was a high-profile visit of this kind. I also find it very difficult to believe that the organisation would hold an equivalent meeting with the Hamas government.’

The journalist, who requested anonymity, added:

‘Not only is Kohavi’s visit unprecedented but it’s also outrageous that one of the most senior editors at the BBC should court company with a foreign military figure in this way, especially one whose country stands accused of serious human rights violations.

‘It further undermines the independence and impartiality that the BBC claims to uphold, and I think it has done irreparable damage to any trust audiences had in the corporation.’

Des Freedman, a professor of media at Goldsmiths, University of London, told Declassified UK he could find no mention of General Kohavi in any BBC, Guardian or FT coverage since 2023, when searching on the Nexis database.

He added:

‘Obviously off the record briefings have a place in journalism. However, meeting secretly with a senior IDF representative in the middle of a genocidal campaign as part of an organised propaganda offensive raises serious questions about integrity and transparency.

‘You would hope that news titles would go out of their way to avoid accusations of bias by rejecting the offer to meet privately and instead to put such meetings on the record. In reality, editors at the Guardian, BBC and FT appear willing to open their doors to Israeli spokespeople – no matter how controversial and offensive – in a way which is denied to Palestinian representatives.’

Conclusion: ‘Palestine Is The Rock’

The function of the major news media, very much including BBC News, is not to fully inform or educate the public about what our governments or other elite forces in society are doing. Their primary role is to maintain structures of state and corporate control that keep the public away from the levers of power.

Jason Hickel, a professor of anthropology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics, made these cogent observations recently via X:

‘Palestine is the rock on which the West will break itself.

‘Put yourself in the shoes of people in the global South. For nearly two years they have watched how Western leaders, who love to talk about human rights and the rule of law, are happy to shred all these values in the most spectacular displays of hypocrisy in order to prop up their military proxy-state as it openly conducts genocide and ethnic cleansing against an occupied people, even in the face of *overwhelming* international condemnation.’

He continued:

‘What do you think people in the South are supposed to conclude from this?  What would *you* conclude from this in their position?  Decades of Western propaganda have been shattered, this time in full technicolour. Western governments have made it clear that they do not care about human rights and the rule of law when it comes to people of colour, the global majority.’

In fact, Western governments do not even care about human rights and the rule of law in their own countries, where these conflict with the requirements of power and control by elites. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out over many decades, ‘there is a very elaborate propaganda system’ in capitalist societies:

‘involving everything, from the public relations industry and advertising to the corporate media, which simply marginalizes a large part of the population. They technically are allowed to participate by pushing buttons every few years, but they have essentially no role in formulating policy. They can ratify decisions made by others.’

(Noam Chomsky and James Kelman, Between Thought and Expression Lies a Lifetime: Why Ideas Matter, PM Press, 2021, p. 159)

BBC News is a crucial component of this elaborate propaganda system. No amount of self-serving managerial rhetoric about ‘trust’, ‘transparency’ and ‘impartiality’ can refute that fundamental reality.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Media Lens.

While I have tried to limit them as much as possible, these reviews may contain spoilers.

The East, directed by Zal Batmanglij; starring Brit Marling, Alexander Skarsgård, and Elliot Page (2013)

The East tells the gripping story of Jane, a young woman (played by Brit Marling) who is employed at a private intelligence company, and who is awarded the sought-after assignment of infiltrating a radical environmental organization called The East. Like many Americans who have “good jobs,” Jane is zealously devoted to her career and devoid of a moral compass. Her unbridled ambition is on full display when Jane is told by her boyfriend that she’s still a winner to him if she doesn’t get this coveted commission (the details of which are unbeknownst to him), to which she responds, “I’m only a winner if I get it.”

When Jane infiltrates the group, which she is able to do because of her youth and because of certain strategies she employs to gain the group’s trust, she realizes that she is unable to intellectually counter any of their arguments regarding ecological degradation caused by unfettered corporate power. Indeed, Jane is a conformist, and like many highly credentialed Americans has never learned to think for herself. This raises the possibility of her potentially becoming a double agent.

The environmentalists are exquisitely cast, and the leaders of the group possess remarkable depth. They are also well educated, having come from privileged families and having attended elite schools. Their dilemma is that they have managed to retain firm moral convictions making them unemployable.

In a more democratic and civilized society, the leaders of The East would likely hold positions of power and influence. Instead, they live as outcasts. The time Jane spends with the radical collective forces her to reexamine her preconceived understanding of success. Is true success possible without principles and ideals?

The two worlds Jane navigates, the ruthless corporate world of violence and skulduggery and an America enraged at corporate malfeasance, shake the foundation of her identity and sense of reality. The East’s methods for combatting corporate villainy – actions they call “jams” – are extreme and of dubious legality, further straining the protagonist’s sense of right and wrong. What happens to the rule of law when what is legal and what is moral no longer coincide?

Having never spent time around articulate people who value honor over money (in stark contrast with her pitiless boss and hard-driving colleagues), the time Jane spends with the collective catapults her into an existential crisis where her value system is upended and she is forced to make extremely difficult and life-altering choices.

Wendy and Lucy, directed by Kelly Reichardt; starring Michelle Williams (2008)

No film in the post-New Deal era embodies the tragic destruction of the American working class more than Wendy and Lucy. In this harsh world millions have been left without jobs, health insurance; or in the case of the film’s protagonist, Wendy, even a family member to crash with.

Caught up in a tempest of economic devastation, Wendy is left with nothing except a few hundred dollars, a jalopy which serves both as makeshift home and means of transportation, and her beloved dog Lucy – her only companion.

The grave circumstances of her situation are tragic and soulful cinema viewers will all feel a deep sense of compassion for her increasingly dire situation. As she passes through flyover country the lack of communities and economic life almost resemble that of a post-apocalyptic tale. Deindustrialization, the outsourcing and offshoring of countless jobs, and the financialization of the economy have cut millions of Americans adrift, of whom our suffering protagonist is one.

Wendy and Lucy is the antithesis of mass market Hollywood cinema where everyone seems to magically have friends and money. Wendy’s brother-in-law and an elderly security guard she meets feel pity for her plight, yet they are also “strapped” and are in no meaningful position to assist her.

How many trillions of dollars have been spent on wars, cannibalistic proxies, and on maintaining hundreds of bases around the world while destitute Americans drown in a sea of oligarchic avarice?

Having heard that there is work there, Wendy is headed to Alaska. Yet when her car breaks down and events threaten to separate her from Lucy her poverty, loneliness, and despair become almost unbearable. Instead of job opportunities, friends, and family she is enveloped by a shroud of silence.

Margin Call, directed by JC Chandor; starring Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Demi Moore and Zachary Quinto (2011)

Perhaps the best movie ever made about Wall Street, Margin Call tells the story of the financial crash of 2008. The story, which unfolds over a 24-hour period, revolves around a powerful Wall Street investment bank, and one of the key motifs of the film is not only how these demonic corporations treat their fellow Americans, but how they treat their own workers.

When an entry-level analyst is covertly handed a flash drive by his recently fired boss, he discovers that the firm is in danger of going bankrupt due to having invested too heavily in unstable mortgage-backed securities whose value is rapidly deteriorating.  He alerts his superiors and senior management calls an emergency meeting in the dead of night. The firm’s CEO (brought to life in an unforgettable performance by Jeremy Irons), whose helicopter makes a dramatic landing on the roof of their skyscraper, reminds everyone that his motto is, “Be first, be smarter, or cheat.” Only concerned with self-preservation, he is prepared to do virtually anything to prevent the firm from going under, and this rabid tribalism supersedes loyalty to one’s country and even to the financial services industry itself whose fellow vultures they are preparing to swindle.

The firm is infested with sociopaths like New York City garbage is crawling with cockroaches. At one point a young analyst is found crying in the bathroom after being notified that he will shortly be let go, and one of the senior managers indifferently takes note of his distress while simultaneously shaving with a cold-blooded hauteur and likely pondering ways to unload “The biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of capitalism” (to quote their CEO). Here, apart from one’s ability to generate significant profits, human life has no value. There are only “winners” and “losers,” and the “winners” are the ones that continue to make the big bucks.

No less disturbing are instances where employees are not allowed to quit, such as one Kafkaesque situation where the firm sends its people scouring the bars of lower Manhattan to try and find the recently laid off and now distraught head of risk management, who they learn has important insights into how they ended up in this disastrous situation in the first place, yet who was cruelly fired after nineteen years of devoted service with even his phone being shut off. Despite his wife informing the firm that her husband doesn’t want to speak to them, he is eventually located and forced to return to work when threats are made to revoke his severance package.

There is a scene where one of the senior managers played by Kevin Spacey comes out of his office applauding after a huge number of the firm’s employees were just laid off. Participating in this death cult ritual, his obsequious subordinates mimic his behavior. Speaking of those recently sacked, he says, “They were good at their jobs. You were better.”

Spacey’s character is later treated in a similar fashion when he returns to his former home to bury his dog (whom he evidently cares for far more than the small business owners undoubtedly run into the ground by his firm), only to be told by his ex-wife that, “You don’t live here anymore,” and that, “The alarm is on so don’t try to break in.” In a mirroring of how he has long treated his employees, his wife has replaced him with another husband.

Margin Call vividly portrays a diseased America that is at war with the world and at war with itself.

Martha Marcy May Marlene, directed by Sean Durkin; starring Elizabeth Olsen, Sarah Paulson, and John Hawkes (2011)

Dying societies invariably become a field of lost souls, and no soul is more lost than the protagonist of Martha Marcy May Marlene, a profound examination into how a disintegrating society can facilitate the rise of cults that prey on, ensnare, and entrap vulnerable human beings. The lead character, Martha, is renamed Marcy May by the cult leader (who is reminiscent of Charles Manson), while Marlene is the name female cult members use when answering the phone and following a script designed to attract new followers.

In a neoliberal America where people increasingly no longer identify themselves as Americans but by their profession, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, Martha no longer has any idea who she is, thereby offering easy prey to the cult. All the ties that may have once bound her to an American history or a personal history have been severed, making her as impressionable as a small child.

Part of the cult’s seductive nature is how it makes use of a vaguely anti-capitalist language. However, its raison d’être is ultimately to annihilate all vestiges of privacy and individuality, resulting in a violent and authoritarian existence for the cult’s members who are taught to share their clothes, their beds; and ultimately, their bodies. The protagonist has many names, and yet no name. For her lack of a cultural value system has dissolved her sense of self.

Initiation into the cult is done by drugging a young woman so that she can be raped by the cult leader, yet the protagonist is told that this is actually a good thing, revealing a Tartarean world where ethics are amorphous and reality is something that can be invented. (To quote Hamlet: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”)

Martha represents millions of young Americans who grow up without a loving family, a real community, and are denied a proper humanities education. Indeed, she is a shell of a human being, a cultural amnesiac devoid of reason, a sense of the past, and a sense of the sacred.

The only place Martha can seek refuge is with her sister and brother-in-law, shallow people concerned only with money and accumulating possessions. Their crass consumerism and indifference to serious socio-economic problems is cultlike in and of itself, offering Martha no clear way to escape from this existential crisis she finds herself in.

The harrowing tale unfolds in a disjointed and fragmented manner, which mirrors the fragmented psyche of the suffering protagonist – and in many ways, of American society itself.

The Girlfriend Experience, directed by Steven Soderbergh; starring Sasha Grey, Chris Santos, and Philip Eytan (2009) 

Steven Soderbergh’s thought-provoking film The Girlfriend Experience (not to be confused with the mini-series) takes us on a journey through another dark circle of this second Gilded Age, where sexual relations have been rendered largely transactional and thereby stripped of tenderness and romance.

Chelsea (Sasha Grey), the film’s protagonist, works as a high-end prostitute for an affluent Manhattan clientele, while her boyfriend is employed as an honest athletic trainer earning a small fraction of what she makes – an all too common paradox, yet one which also serves as a metaphor for how incomes are typically doled out in 21st century America.

In this nihilistic culture that places profit-making over all other considerations, the protagonist has come to believe that one’s sex partner is no different than one’s tennis partner, and that her life as a prostitute for jet-setters will lead to freedom and liberation.

Chelsea worships wealth and will do anything to be with those who have it. In a country where the masses are saddled with trillions of dollars of household debt while a small group of plutocrats enjoy unbridled power, there is virtually no moral barrier she won’t violate in order to spend time with the mega rich, even if it means becoming their plaything and forgoing all traces of dignity.

The film raises disturbing questions about the nature of a hyper-privatized America and its impact on social relations. If a society ceases to hold anything sacred, is it still a real society? Is it possible to retain one’s humanity when one regards people as mere commodities to be used and then discarded? Due to its adoration of materialism and emotionless sexual encounters, is contemporary Western feminism compatible with love?

Chelsea’s hapless and no less delusional boyfriend initially approves of her degenerate lifestyle, and only insists that she doesn’t go on any trips with her “clients,” which, during one heated quarrel, she condemns as “selfish.” Like his wayward would-be lover, he has been taught by the media and education system that his girlfriend can work as a prostitute and that this somehow won’t inevitably destroy their relationship.

The Girlfriend Experience depicts a dystopia where people are incessantly using one another for material gain and real communities have been eradicated under a deathly hand of relentless exploitation, job destruction, and hyper-consumerism which for many Americans have swept away all traces of trust and love.

Michael Clayton, directed by Tony Gilroy; starring Tom Wilkinson, Tilda Swinton, and George Clooney (2007)

There is a riveting scene in Michael Clayton that unfolds in a lower Manhattan neighborhood I know all too well, where Arthur Edens (in a role masterfully executed by Tom Wilkinson), one of his law firm’s lead litigators, is berating Michael Clayton (George Clooney) for continuing to blindly follow their firm’s orders, to which a defensive Clayton says, “I’m not the enemy.” To which Arthur replies, “Then who are you?” Michael Clayton is a story about a society drowning in corporate savagery and two men who are consciously or subconsciously trying to reclaim their humanity.

Arthur represents U-North, an agricultural corporation that has polluted the environment with a carcinogenic weed killer. The problem – at least for his law firm and the corporation they are defending – is that Arthur knows that he has squandered years of his life defending diabolical corporations and, wracked with guilt, has decided that he is tired of fighting on the side of these dastardly forces. To the amazement of his colleagues, one day he suddenly snaps and goes rogue, turning on U-North, which his law firm has been hired to defend in a multibillion dollar class action lawsuit. While initially exasperated, Michael can’t help but be influenced by his friend’s strange behavior, and his amoral ethos is challenged.

Of great significance are the unhappy private lives of Michael, Arthur (who lives alone in an enormous dimly lit Soho loft), and the loyal corporate soldier Karen Crowder (performed chillingly by Tilda Swinton), all of whom make significant six figure salaries yet live lonely lives devoid of meaning and a sense of purpose.

Michael Clayton underscores the catch-22 that many Americans find themselves in, where those who are able to break out of the ignominious cycle of debt slavery and modern serfdom often do so by selling their souls and relinquishing all semblance of morality and freedom of speech, while many of those who have “made it” don’t have time to think about anything other than their extremely demanding jobs which devour every waking moment. Leaving this information bubble by exploring alternative news sources in an attempt to search for answers to these troubling times can lead to thinking, thinking can lead to posting heretical thoughts, which in turn can only lead to being ostracized from elite circles, unemployment, and death – professional, or even literal. And so it pays not to think.

In one haunting scene Clayton is driving in a rural area in upstate New York when he suddenly exits his car to approach three mysterious and strikingly beautiful horses. Like the inversion of the three witches in Macbeth, the animals seem to be calling on him to abandon a life of ambition and to return to a simpler and more humane existence devoid of materialism, dissembling, and relentless competition. The mysticism and primordial timelessness of this moment mesmerize the mind of a man who has lost his way in a brutal world, and serve as a clarion call to reclaim a life that is more dignified and honorable before it is too late.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by David Penner.

Mohammed is one of at least 56 journalists who were assaulted or harassed by security forces or unidentified citizens while covering the #EndBadGovernance demonstrations in Nigeria, one of several countries across sub-Saharan Africa that have experienced anti-government protests in recent months.  

In Kenya, at least a dozen journalists have been targeted by security personnel during weeks of youth-led protests since June, with at least one reporter shot with rubber bullets and several others hit with teargas canisters. Meanwhile, Ugandan police and soldiers used force to quash similar demonstrations over corruption and high living costs, while a Ghanaian court banned planned protests.

Globally, attacks on the press often spike during moments of political tension. In Senegal, at least 25 journalists were attacked, detained, or tear gassed while reporting on February’s protests over delayed elections. Last year, CPJ found that more than 40 Nigerian journalists were detained, attacked, or harassed while reporting on presidential and state elections. In 2020, at least a dozen journalists were attacked during the #EndSARS campaign to abolish Nigeria’s brutal Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) police unit.

CPJ’s documentation of the incidents below, based on interviews with those affected, local media reports, and verified videos and photos, are emblematic of the dangers faced by reporters in many African countries during protests – and the failure of authorities to prioritize journalists’ safety and ending impunity for crimes against journalists.

All but one of the journalists – a reporter for government-owned Radio Nigeria – worked for privately owned media outlets.

July 31

• In western Lagos State, police officers harassed Bernard Akede, a reporter with News Central TV, and his colleagues, digital reporter Eric Thomas and camera operators Karina Adobaba-Harry and Samuel Chukwu, forcing them to pause reporting on the planned protests at the Lekki toll gate.

August 1

• In Abuja, police officers arrested Jide Oyekunle, a photojournalist with the Daily Independent newspaper, and Kayode Jaiyeola, a photojournalist with Punch newspaper, as they covered protests.

• In northern Borno State, at least 10 armed police officers forcefully entered the office of the regional broadcaster Radio Ndarason Internationale (RNI) and detained nine members of staff for five hours. Those held said that police accused them of publishing “fake news” in the arrest documentation and RNI’s project director David Smith told CPJ that the raid was in response to the outlet’s reporting via WhatsApp on the protests.

The detained staff were: head of office Lami Manjimwa Zakka; editor-in-chief Mamman Mahmood; producer Ummi Fatima Baba Kyari; reporters Hadiza Dawud, Zainab Alhaji Ali, and Amina Falmata Mohammed; head of programs Bunu Tijjani; deputy head of programs Ali Musa; and information and communications technology head Abubakar Gajibo.

• In Abuja, police officers threw tear gas canisters at Mary Adeboye, a camera operator with News Central TV; Samuel Akpan, a senior reporter with TheCable news site; and Adefemola Akintade, a reporter with the Peoples Gazette news site. The canisters struck Adeboye and Akpan’s legs, causing swelling.

• In northern Kano city, unidentified attackers wielding machetes and sticks smashed the windows of a Channels Television-branded bus carrying 11 journalists and a car carrying two journalists.

The journalists were: reporters Ibrahim Ayyuba Isah of TVC News broadcaster, whose hand was cut by glass; Ayo Adenaiye of Arise News broadcaster, whose laptop was damaged; Murtala Adewale of The Guardian newspaper, Bashir Bello of Vanguard newspaper, Abdulmumin Murtala of Leadership newspaper, Sadiq Iliyasu Dambatta of Channels Television, and Caleb Jacob and Victor Christopher of Cool FM, Wazobia FM, and Arewa Radio broadcasters; camera operators John Umar of Channels Television, Ibrahim Babarami of Arise News, Iliyasu Yusuf of AIT broadcaster, Usman Adam of TVC News; and multimedia journalist Salim Umar Ibrahim of Daily Trust newspaper.

• In southern Delta State, at least 10 unidentified assailants opposed to the protest attacked four journalists: reporters Monday Osayande of The Guardian newspaper, Matthew Ochei of Punch newspaper, Lucy Ezeliora of The Pointer newspaper, and investigative journalist Prince Amour Udemude, whose phone was snatched. Osayande told CPJ by phone that they did not make a formal complaint to police about the attack because several police officers saw it happen, but added that the state commissioner for information, Efeanyi Micheal Osuoza, had promised to investigate. Osuoza told CPJ by phone that he was investigating the matter and would ensure the replacement of Udemude’s phone.

August 3

• In Abuja’s national stadium, masked security forces fired bullets and tear gas in the direction of 18 journalists covering the protests, several of whom were wearing “Press” vests.

The journalists were: Premium Times reporters Abdulkareem Mojeed, Emmanuel Agbo, Abdulqudus Ogundapo, and Popoola Ademola; TheCable videographer Mbasirike Joshua and reporters Dyepkazah Shibayan, Bolanle Olabimtan, and Claire Mom; AIT reporter Oscar Ihimhekpen and camera operators Femi Kuku and Olugbenga Ogunlade; News Central TV camera operator Eno-Obong Koffi and reporter Emmanuel Bagudu; the nonprofit International Centre for Investigative Reporting’s video journalist Johnson Fatumbi and reporters Mustapha Usman and Nurudeen Akewushola; and Peoples Gazette reporters Akintade and Ebube Ibeh.

Kuku dislocated his leg and Ademola cut his knees and broke his phone while fleeing.

• In Abuja’s Wuse neighborhood, unidentified men robbed Victorson Agbenson, political editor of the government-owned Radio Nigeria broadcaster, and his driver Chris Ikwu at knifepoint as they covered a protest.

August 6

• In Lagos State, unidentified armed men hit four journalists from News Central TV and their vehicle with sticks. The journalists were News Central TV’s Akede, camera operator Adobaba-Harry, reporter Consin-Mosheshe Ogheneruru, and camera operator Albert David.

Abuja police spokesperson Josephine Adeh told CPJ by phone on August 16 that police did not carry out any attacks on the media and asked for evidence of such attacks before ending the call. She also accused CPJ of harassing her.

Police spokespersons Bright Edafe of Delta State and Haruna Abdullahi of Kano State told CPJ that their officers had not received any complaints about attacks on the press.

Lagos State police spokesperson Benjamin Hundeyin referred CPJ to the state’s police Complaint Response Unit, where the person who answered CPJ’s initial phone call declined to identify themselves and said they had no information about attacks on journalists. CPJ’s subsequent calls and messages went unanswered.

CPJ’s repeated calls and messages to Borno State Commissioner for Information Usman Tar requesting comment were unanswered.

See also: CPJ’s guidance for journalists covering protests  

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Evelyn Okakwu.

On Wednesday, January 24, a gunman shot and killed Mejía, founder and director of the independent Sonora Estero radio station in the northern town of San Pedro, at his home, according to Colombian authorities and news reports. A security camera video of the attack shows two men on a motorcycle approaching Mejía as he parks his own motorcycle inside his house. One of the men holding a pistol briefly enters the house and then jumps back on the motorcycle, which speeds away.

“The Colombian authorities must immediately investigate this unacceptable crime against journalist Mardonio Mejía Mendoza and hold those responsible to account as soon as possible,” said Cristina Zahar, CPJ’s Latin America and the Caribbean program coordinator, in São Paulo. “Killing a journalist sends a bad message to society and undermines press freedom in the country.”  

Mejía, 67, hosted a daily hour-long program that included reports about crime and law enforcement, Viviana Yanguma, a researcher for the Bogotá-based Foundation for Press Freedom (FLIP) told CPJ. She said Mejía was one of the region’s best-known journalists and had received death threats for his reporting in 2013.

Manuel Morón, president of the National Association of Journalists in Sucre department, which includes San Pedro, told CPJ that Mejía often criticized public officials on the air for waste and mismanagement and sometimes received irate phone calls about his coverage, but said he had no knowledge of threats against the journalist.

Mejía’s brother, Ramiro, told CPJ that the journalist was extremely animated on the air, voicing his opinions and adding sound effects, like barking dogs, when he denounced local officials.

Another journalist in San Pedro, who spoke with CPJ on condition of anonymity due to safety concerns, said that Mejía was also a cattle rancher and had received several extortion threats in recent years but had refused to make the payments. He said Mejía worked part-time as an auctioneer and had overseen a cattle auction in San Pedro on the day he was killed.  

The day of the shooting, Sucre Governor Lucy García Montes announced a 20 million peso (US$5,100) reward for information leading to the capture of those responsible for the crime. 

Hours after the shooting, police arrested Ledinwit Yesith Díaz Mercado in San Pedro. A statement by the Attorney General’s office on Friday said Díaz had been placed in preventive detention as the main suspect in the killing of Mejía. In a video posted on X, formerly Twitter, Fernando Salgado, director of the Attorney General’s office in Sucre department, said Díaz had been accused of aggravated homicide.  

Sucre is home to numerous drug-trafficking groups and rising violence, with nearly one homicide per day registered in 2023, according to a FLIP statement. That year, FLIP said, four journalists who covered local politics and environmental issues in Sucre received threats in connection with their work.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Photo by Dorothea von Haeften

Lucy Poulin, a champion of Maine’s rural poor for more than 50 years, died October 14 in her home in East Orland, Maine at the age of 83. Lucy was a founder and longtime director of H.O.M.E. Co-op (Homeworkers Organized for More Employment) in Orland, Maine. Founded in 1970, H.O.M.E. is a non-profit that provides services to and creates employment for the low- and very low-income community of rural Hancock County, Maine.

But Lucy Poulin was much more than a nonprofit director. I knew Lucy for 42 years and worked with her for much of that time. Lucy dedicated her life to creating lives of dignity for thousands of people, many of them battered by life and many who just happened to land at H.O.M.E’s Orland campus. No forms to fill out. No ID required. State a need, and under Lucy’s leadership H.O.M.E Co-op did its best to fill that need. Shelter. Housing. Food. Hot meals. Clothing. Day care. Education. And jobs. Real jobs. Construction. Logging. Sawmill. In the kitchen. In the day care center. In the Learning Center.e In the craft cooperative and craft store, where homebound crafters earned 40 percent more than retail shops paid. And it all started from nothing.

H.O.M.E is a member of the worldwide Emmaus movement, a global Catholic-inspired poor people’s movement founded in Paris in the immediate aftermath of World War II by Frenchman Abbe Pierre. They were once known as the ragpickers of Paris, a name Lucy liked, as it embodied the fight for the very poor, who are left out by many assistance programs, governmental and private.

Lucy came from rural working-class stock. Her father was a logger. He worked in logging camps deep in the Maine woods for entire winters, emerging only when spring rains and the resultant mud made it impossible to transport the felled trees to Maine’s great rivers, where they flowed by the thousands downstream to the state’s paper mills and shipyards. Like many rural Mainers, Lucy was raised on hard work, and it stuck, all her life.

It’s tempting to say that Lucy rose from very humble roots to a higher station, but Lucy would reject the idea that this is an elevation in life. To her the poor and working poor were as extraordinary as presidents, and were to be honored and celebrated every bit as much. For Lucy that was not a distant, abstract concept. It was who she was. It was in her bones.

Lucy helped create the St. Francis Community on 300 wooded acres in East Orland, where for decades she lived and broke bread with those who had been knocked about by life. At St. Francis they found peace and refuge, surrounded by woods, dogs, cats, horses, chickens, geese, peacocks and sheep. All were welcome. No questions asked. No forms. No ID. Just like at H.O.M.E. Co-op.

H.O.M.E. became a sanctuary for undocumented refugees fleeing war in Central America in the 1980s, and it became a stop on the underground railroad that led Central American refugees to real refuge in Canada. We ran refugees through remote Orient, Maine, where, before 9/11, border workers went home after work and left the border wide open. And we protested the U.S. dollars that were fueling those wars.

H.O.M.E. built homes for the poor, the working poor and the homeless. And Lucy didn’t just design and implement the housing programs. Lucy didn’t mail in a check. She invited the homeless into her home. She pounded nails. And she was happiest when she did.

In dedicating her life to the poor, Lucy walked the walk as few have. But what amazed me most about Lucy was her enormous power of forgiveness. I’ve never seen its equal.

But Lucy wasn’t blinded by rose-colored glasses. One of my favorite memories of Lucy took place one day in H.O.M.E. Co-op’s soup kitchen. While I was waiting my turn in line, someone asked me in anger, “Why do you hate rich people?” and I said, “Because they’re destroying the world. If you don’t believe me, ask Lucy.” The person looked over at Lucy, who was sitting a few feet away, and Lucy quietly nodded her head.

Somewhere is a black and white photo of me and Lucy talking, when I was in my early twenties and she in her forties. I have long since forgotten what we were discussing, but in the photo I am speaking and I am counting off discussion points with my fingers. And Lucy is listening. Attentively. At that young age my points were likely half-baked, but that didn’t bothered Lucy. She was listening. She listened.

And that was Lucy. Listening. Forgiving. And fighting. Always fighting. For the poor. For everyone. Because Lucy knew that the fight for the poor was the fight for the souls of all of us, every one of us, rich and poor.

I miss Lucy, as do many. She changed many lives, mine among them. Lucy Poulins don’t come along every day.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Lawrence Reichard.

… while Lord Sydenham warned: “What we have done, by concessions not to the Jewish people but to a Zionist extreme section, is to start a running sore in the East, and no-one can tell how far that sore will extend.”

It extends all the way to this horror-show 106 years later.

What the latest phase of the Palestine-Israel struggle teaches us is that UK and other Western media are determined to bully anyone with pro-Palestine views into condemning Hamas as terrorists.

Even the Palestinian ambassador to Britain, Husam Zomlot, was cruelly treated in this way by a BBC interviewer only hours after several of the poor man’s family had been indiscriminately killed in an Israeli revenge attack.

And political leaders, acting like the Zionist Inquisition, are threatening anyone who voices criticism of Israel with expulsion from their party.

Even the BBC has been pressured by the Government’s culture secretary, Lucy Frazer, to call Hamas “terrorists” instead of “militants”. The BBC (so far) has resisted her silliness. Ms Frazer is Jewish and served an internship with the Israeli Ministry of Justice.

And while our Government was projecting an image of the Israeli flag onto the front of 10 Downing Street to emphasise solidarity with the apartheid regime our home secretary, Suella Braverman, was threatening Palestinian flag wavers with prosecution.

Our monarch King Charles III has graciously favoured us with a royal opinion. “His Majesty is appalled by and condemns the barbaric acts of terrorism in Israel,” a palace spokesperson said. And a spokes for Prince William and his wife, Kate, said they were “profoundly distressed by the devastating events that have unfolded in the past days. The horrors inflicted by Hamas’ terrorist attack upon Israel are appalling; they utterly condemn them. As Israel exercises its right of self-defence, all Israelis and Palestinians will continue to be stalked by grief, fear and anger in the time to come.” No mention of the “barbaric” day-to-day terror tactics by Israel which led up to the present crisis. Or the Palestinians’ right of self-defence.

A response to these attempts to humiliate and punish could simply be: “and when did you last condemn Israel for its 75 years of atrocities?” Or “if Hamas committed war crimes why is Israel responding with even bigger war crimes?”

The crisis has brought from the US an unforgettably half-witted speech which conjured up the priceless image of Biden supergluing himself to Netanyahu’s backside in a pathetic show of undying unity.

And after all the nonsense uttered in high places sincere thanks go to Moeen Ali, the England cricket vice-captain, who posted on social media a quote from Malcolm X: “If you’re not careful the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” Sadly it has already happened.

So what exactly is driving our Establishment élite to defend and revere a criminal regime whose inhumane policies disgust ordinary folk?

Who started it all?

Should we go back 106 years and pin it on Balfour? Or 75 years when Zionist militias rampaged through Palestine massacring, pillaging and driving local residents from their homes as they pursued ‘Plan Dalet’, their ethnic cleansing blueprint for a violent and bloody takeover of the Holy Land? Or 2006 when Israel (backed by US and UK) began the siege of Gaza after Hamas won the 2006 elections fair and square according to international observers.

It helps to understand a little of the earlier history too. There was a Jewish state in the Holy Land some 3,000 years ago, but the Canaanites and Philistines were there first. The Jews, one of several invading groups, left and returned several times, and were expelled by the Roman occupation in 70AD and again in 135AD. Since the 7th century Palestine has been mainly Arabic, coming under Ottoman rule in 1516.

During the First World War the country was ‘liberated’ from the Turkish Ottomans after the Allied Powers, in correspondence between Sir Henry McMahon and Sharif Hussein ibn Ali of Mecca in 1915, promised independence to Arab leaders in return for their help in defeating Germany’s ally, Turkey. However, a new Jewish political movement called Zionism was finding favour among the ruling élite in London, and the British Government was persuaded by the Zionists’ chief spokesman, Chaim Weizman, to surrender Palestine for their new Jewish homeland. Hardly a thought, it seems, was given to the earlier pledge to the Arabs, who had occupied and owned the land for 1,500 years – longer than the Jews ever did.

The Zionists, fuelled by the notion that an ancient Biblical prophecy gave them the title deeds, aimed to push the Arabs out by populating the area with millions of Eastern European Jews. They had already set up farm communities and founded a new city, Tel Aviv, but by 1914 Jews still numbered only 85,000 to the Arabs’ 615,000.

The infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917 – actually a letter from the British foreign secretary, Lord Balfour, to the most senior Jew in England, Lord Rothschild – pledged assistance for the Zionist cause with no regard for the consequences to the native majority.

Calling itself a “declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations”, it said:

His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing and non-Jewish communities…

Balfour, a Zionist convert and arrogant with it, wrote: “In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country. The four powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now occupy that land.”

There was opposition, of course. Lord Sydenham warned: “The harm done by dumping down an alien population upon an Arab country may never be remedied. What we have done, by concessions not to the Jewish people but to a Zionist extreme section, is to start a running sore in the East, and no-one can tell how far that sore will extend.”

And Lord Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the Cabinet, was strongly opposed to the whole idea and to Zionism itself, which he called “a mischievous political creed”. He wrote to his Cabinet colleagues:

…I assume that it means that Mahommedans [Muslims] and Christians are to make way for the Jews and that the Jews should be put in all positions of preference and should be peculiarly associated with Palestine in the same way that England is with the English or France with the French, that Turks and other Mahommedans in Palestine will be regarded as foreigners, just in the same way as Jews will hereafter be treated as foreigners in every country but Palestine. Perhaps also citizenship must be granted only as a result of a religious test.

Nevertheless his Zionist cousin Herbert Samuel was appointed the first High Commissioner of the British Mandate of Palestine, a choice that showed impartiality was never a priority.

The American King-Crane Commission of 1919 thought it a gross violation of principle. “No British officers consulted by the Commissioners believed that the Zionist programme could be carried out except by force of arms. That, of itself, is evidence of a strong sense of the injustice of the Zionist programme.”

There were other reasons why the British were courting disaster. A secret deal, called the Sykes-Picot Agreement, had been concluded in 1916 between France and Britain, in consultation with Russia, to re-draw the map of the Middle Eastern territories won from Turkey. Britain was to take Jordan, Iraq and Haifa. The area now referred to as Palestine was declared an international zone.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Balfour Declaration and the promises made earlier in the McMahon-Hussein letters all cut across each other. It seems to have been a case of the left hand not knowing what the right was doing in the confusion of war.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917 Lenin released a copy of the confidential Sykes-Picot Agreement into the public domain, sowing seeds of distrust among the Arabs. Thus the unfolding story had all the makings of a major tragedy.

And now another spanner has been tossed into the works. Law expert Dr Ralph Wilde argues that Article 22 of the 1923 League of Nations ‘Mandate Agreement’ for Palestine required provisional independence to be conferred on Palestine and that this could not be lawfully bypassed. Britain’s failure, as the Mandated power, to comply was a violation of international law then with ongoing consequences now, and is therefore a basis for action today.

Article 22 says that those colonies and territories which, as a consequence of World War 1, ceased to be under the sovereignty of the States which formerly governed them and are not yet able to stand by themselves should come under the tutelage of “advanced nations who by reason of their resources, their experience or their geographical position can best be exercised by them as Mandatories on behalf of the League…. Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognizedsubject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatoryuntil such time as they are able to stand alone.”

So Britain’s underhandedness is exposed again.

And who started the Palestine-Israel war that inevitably broke out 25 years later? Read the history – it’s all documented. And no, they don’t teach it in schools, it’s far too embarrassing for this ‘great power’.

The slaughter has been horrific

Today, propaganda would have us believe that Israelis have continuously suffered at the hands of Palestinian terrorists. But it’s actually the other way around. Don’t take my word for it, just look at the figures supplied by Israeli NGO B’Tselem which was established in 1989 by a group of Israeli lawyers, doctors and academics to document human rights violations in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories and combat any denial that such violations happened. The previous year had seen the First Intifada (uprising) in which Israeli forces killed 311 Palestinians, 53 of whom were under the age of 17.

The figures compiled by B’Tselem run from 29 September 2000 (the start of the Second Intifada) to 27 September 2023.

• Palestinians killed by Israeli forces 10,555
• Palestinians killed by Israeli civilians 96
• Palestinians Killed by unknowns 16
• Total 10,667
• Israeli forces killed by Palestinians 449
• Israeli civilians killed by Palestinians 881
• Total 1,330

So Israelis are far more proficient at killing fellow humans and they’ve been killing Palestinians at the rate of 8:1. Worse still is the butchery of children. The figures show 2,270 Palestinian children killed versus 145 Israeli children, a ratio of nearly 16:1. And when it comes to women it’s 656 Palestinians to 261 Israelis, about 2.5:1.

These statistics are available to everyone. What’s extraordinary is the large number of senior politicians who, with one voice it seems, condemn Hamas and sympathise with Israel. Why would they rush to protect the feelings of an apartheid state that has been brutally oppressing, murdering, dispossessing and generally making life unbearable for Palestinian in their own homeland?

That said, nobody is approving Hamas’s methods (if they have been reported accurately) which may have alienated a lot of otherwise sympathetic supporters and damaged the Palestinian cause. But the facts show that what they did a few days ago was nothing compared to the Israelis’ 75 years of terror and oppression.

Israel is notorious for its disinformation, or ‘hasbara’, and Hamas say their fighters have been targeting Israeli military and security posts and bases – all of which are legitimate targets – and seeking to avoid hurting civilians. They call on Western mainstream media “to seek both truth and accuracy in reporting on the ongoing Israeli aggression against the besieged Gaza Strip”.

But this is an era of false flags, deception and plain bad journalism, as we’ve seen from Ukraine, so mainstream media cannot be trusted. I’ve watched the media eagerly interviewing Israeli families who live close to the Gaza border and commiserating their loss. But, on reflection, what do you think of people who have spent years nextdoor to a security fence on the other side of which their government has cruelly incarcerated another people for 17 years, denying them essential power supplies, water, food, medicines, goods, and freedom of movement, while bombing them regularly in a diabolical policy called “mowing the grass”, and even limiting access to their own coastal waters and blocking access to their marine gasfield…. and don’t seem in the least concerned that such hideous crimes are perpetrated in their name? How innocent are they?

Self-defence?

Then there’s the endlessly repeated claim the Israel has a right to defend itself. But Israel is illegally occupying the Palestinians’ homeland and using military force to maintain its grip and to tightly control every aspect of the Palestinians’ increasingly miserable lives. As for Israel’s armed squatters, they have been implanted outside their own territory and are classified as war criminals. Like Israel’s army of ongoing occupation they are the aggressors and have no right of self-defence. The Palestinians on the other hand, being subjected to an illegal military occupation, are the ones with the right under international law to defend themselves.

What gives them that right is United Nations Resolution 37/43 of 3 December 1982 which is concerned with “the universal realization of the right of peoples to self-determination and of the speedy granting of independence to colonial countries and peoples for the effective guarantee and observance of human rights…. Considering that the denial of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination, sovereignty, independence and return to Palestine and the repeated acts of aggression by Israel against the people of the region constitute a serious threat to international peace and security, [the Resolution]

1. Calls upon all States to implement fully and faithfully all the resolutions of the United Nations regarding the exercise of the right to self-determination and independence by peoples under colonial and foreign domination;

2. Reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for their independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial domination, apartheid and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.”

It goes on to strongly condemn “the constant and deliberate violations of the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people, as well as the expansionist activities of Israel in the Middle East, which constitute an obstacle to the achievement of self-determination and independence by the Palestinian people and a threat to peace and stability in the region.”

That we are still waiting after 40+ years for these fine principles to be implemented shows how useless the UN really is and how little the major powers value international law unless it happens to suit their own often questionable purposes.

Jewish voices

JVP (Jewish Voice for Peace) has sent me their latest statement:

We wholeheartedly agree with leading Palestinian rights groups: the massacres committed by Hamas against Israeli civilians are horrific war crimes. There is no justification in international law for the indiscriminate killing of civilians or the holding of civilian hostages.

And now, horrifyingly, the Israeli and American governments are weaponizing these deaths to fuel a genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza, pledging to “open the gates of hell.” This war is a continuation of the Nakba, when in 1948, tens of thousands of Palestinians fleeing violence sought refuge in Gaza. It’s a continuation of 75 years of Israeli occupation and apartheid.

Already this week, over 1,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed. The Israeli government has wrought complete and total devastation on Palestinians across Gaza, attacking hospitals, schools, mosques, marketplaces, and apartment buildings.

As we write, the Israeli government has shut off all electricity to Gaza. Hospitals cannot save lives, the internet will collapse, people will have no phones to communicate with the outside world, and drinking water for two million people will run out. Gaza will be plunged into darkness as Israel turns its neighborhoods to rubble. Still worse, Israel has openly stated an intention to commit mass atrocities and even genocide, with Prime Minister Netanyahu saying the Israeli response will “reverberate for generations.

And right now, the U.S. government is enabling the Israeli government’s atrocities, sending weapons, moving U.S. warships into proximity and sending U.S.-made munitions, and pledging blanket support and international cover for any actions taken by the Israeli government. Furthermore, the U.S. government officials are spreading racist, hateful, and incendiary rhetoric that will fuel mass atrocities and genocide.

The loss of Israeli lives is being used by our government to justify the rush to genocide, to provide moral cover for the immoral push for more weapons and more death. Palestinians are being dehumanized by our own government, by the media, by far too many U.S. Jewish institutions. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that Israel is “fighting human animals” and should “act accordingly,” As Jews, we know what happens when people are called animals.

We can and we must stop this. Never again means never again — for anyone. [bold added]

Thank you JVP. Amen to that.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

Is it bad that I don’t really think about intention? My job isn’t to babysit people and help them understand my relation to “the Korean American experience.” It’s a little patronizing to intentionally coddle people through these narratives and ideas and intentions. I think my music does a lot of the explanation for me, because I already do that work for myself. You can do that work if you want to.

And on that note of letting the music speak for itself, your music used to be more text-to-speech-oriented: heavier, more ambient. You have a distinctly different sound these days, with a lot more piano and vocals, and I was wondering how your creative process has changed over the past few years–I remember you once hilariously said you just “shit it out.”

Absolutely, I just shit it out. But beyond that, I wanted to avoid using the piano as much as possible in my earlier work because I really wanted to understand how to utilize different methods and ideas and musical approaches to express an idea: the individual transmogrification of each element. I took that really seriously in the beginning, but then I grew more comfortable with the idea that these instruments and arrangements are not as strictly independent as you’d think. They’re all in conversation with one another. So we can think about the piano also having a life of its own as a vocalist, and conversely, we can think about the actual sounds coming out of the voice, rather than just the words. It’s still a shitting out, but intentionally in that I feel more comfortable just allowing things to exist, rather than trying to focus on a strict methodological approach.

That’s very producer-minded of you. There’s often, for lack of a better term, a neutering of craft. Methodological process is often treated as a very sterile thing, but you manage to put so much emotion into these deeply precise arrangements.

It’s approaching music with this fearlessness of pretending that nobody else is going to hear it: that I can truly talk about any topic that I want to. But beyond that, it’s an immediacy in how my source material and inspirations flow directly into the work. Dog Dreams (개꿈), was inspired by dreams that I had, and I had started working on those pieces as soon as I’d woken up. So it’s just that immediacy, but also that perception of limitlessness that really propels an emotional proximity and intensity.

Specifying a “perception” intrigues me because the end result of your creative process still reflects that limitlessness, whether you truly believe it or not. How do you push past self-doubt?

Honestly, it’s just doing it. It’s just trying and trying until something feels interesting. Whether that feeling is good or bad, it provides some kind of trajectory of how I can fully interpret what I’m doing. But another part of it is that at the end of the day, music is just sounds. It’s just noise. So I think approaching making music with a certain intensity, but also that sense of levity, is helpful. That balanced approach really lets that perception of limitlessness or that fearlessness set in.

That’s stunning.

I mean, you’re a fucking writer, you know this.

It’s important to have levity, of course. And as a writer frequently paralyzed by fear, I very much admire that you can just go for it. Which leads me to ask–not to be glib, but your process is quite vibe-oriented. Still, you delve into heavy subjects, and it’s also interesting that the press surrounding your work often paints you as a narrator telling stories, when many of these subjects are deeply personal to you. How do you go about reconciling difficult memories with the works you’ve created around them?

Again, I think it’s that sense of immediacy. For the middle piece of Dog Dreams, I had a terrifying dream that I really wanted to flesh out as soon as I woke up: get to work, just figure out what’s going on in there. And I guess what also allows me to address these very personal, even traumatic moments, is the fact that music is just abstraction. When you allow certain pieces of sound–chord structures or arrangements or even just random noises–to hold such personal meaning, it provides a sanctuary to really remember; this moment is what this part represents, for me. That’s what music is a lot of times: the work of projection, and the work of abstraction. That creates many opportunities for me to create stuff addressing difficult times.

I love that explanation. You’re hardworking in a markedly interior way. And you are acclaimed, so let’s just get that out of the way. But I’m curious as to how your drive to create for yourself, and yourself alone, has evolved since you started making music.

In high school, it started as a rejection of this insane amount of work I was putting into classical piano. It wasn’t making me happy, and it wasn’t allowing me to reach these ideas or feelings that I’d really wanted to express in music. It was an act of rebellion in the most immature way, but it’s funny because that rebellion was also work, in terms of feeling like I had to find out where I belonged sonically. Even throughout college, I was just constantly trying things out. I guess that’s the interior work that you’re talking about, where I’d search for a musical space or language that really spoke to me in the same way that some classical pieces spoke to me when I was younger.

I only really started to find it my senior year, when Welfare came out. And as soon as I found that language, it turned out not to be anywhere specific to belong, but something that I was just trying out. That’s when I really geared my work in a different direction: let’s really understand the domain and the parameters of this actual musical language that I am employing.

And a lot of it just comes from a place of comfort. I heard a lot of pansori when I was younger. There were certain moments of clarity for me where I’d realize a certain structure was working for me, because I’d see how it connected to my grandparents, or to the first time my mom took me to a pansori show in Korea. I think it’s these connections that really allowed the interior work to shift from just trying to find a place to belong, to understanding this musical language that I’m still trying to fully employ.

That’s beautiful. I feel like when people use the term “world-building,” they usually imagine the artist as just the artist, acting as a center point and building larger narratives around themselves. To be able to do that on such an internal level is genius, and probably exhausting as fuck. Do you find yourself having to take a break from that process?

Definitely. I allow myself to take that break by looking for sources of inspiration outside of music. I have some peers and friends who listen to music constantly, and I don’t do that; I only listen to music when I feel like it, and I only listen to what I want to. And most of the time it’s Mariah Carey.

But it’s really just a lot of ideas and work and people from beyond music. Anything can make you think about your work in a different way, and I think having great peers that are outside of music is just as important as having great peers inside it. It just cultivates new modes of thinking.

It really does add dimensionality to the meaning behind one form of media; you did say music is technically just sounds. And a job is a job is a job, but there’s this seemingly automatic mindset of art as a product first, rather than a means of engaging with the world around you. Which segues into the detour I wanted to take about the video game that you released to accompany Dog Dreams—I need to know where you got that idea from.

Where do I begin? I knew I wanted to incorporate a visual element, but I thought, a 15-minute video? Are you fucking kidding me? That just sounds crazy. I’m not here to produce a film. And honestly, I was also just unconvinced by a lot of the music videos that I was seeing. Music videos just felt like a promotional element, and to me, the thought of making one felt really empty; it didn’t register as something meaningful that I wanted to do.

I was dating my partner, who does computer art and technical 3D art, and he has this fascination with video games of all kinds. I remember a lot of our first dates were him making me play video games like Bloodborne. At first I thought, “Hello? Are you kidding?” But then I thought about how immersive these games are in such different ways, and how each artistic element would correspond with one another and with the game itself. So I figured I’d try to make a very simplistic game where visual elements could marry with the music that I was making. In it, the terrain shifts the entire time, almost indefinitely; again, there’s that perceived limitlessness, and I love how you can experience that physically. I love the end correspondence with the music, too, and just how those two can work in tandem. It was definitely difficult because the song is so long and there’s only so much that we can do with the allotted time, but it’s something I want to explore more in the future. I’m really happy with it.

I love that concept of letting the player walk around and experience this constant shift alongside the music. When you extricate yourself from the creative process, though, how do you take the time to care for just yourself?

Besides The Real Housewives, I’ve thought about this for a long time because the music I make is very draining. I’m sure it’s extremely draining to listen to, but it’s also very draining to make. But somehow, the way for me to push through that is making more music. Something I really stress within my process in general is that not everything has to come out and be a project; you can just make something to make something. I think the best way that I take care of myself is doodling, but with music.

I don’t like a lot of what I make, but it’s fun, it’s entertaining, and it’s also exciting. When I’m belaboring over certain ideas or certain elements, it allows me to keep a relative distance from what I’m trying to finish, and it also reminds me of how exciting this process can continue to be.

Continuing to rediscover the joy in your work can be laborious, especially with the added pressures of the outside world: from labels and shows and all the things that come as a package deal with being an artist. Returning to this idea of a self-perceived limitlessness driving you forward, how do you maintain that outlook in the face of very real, rigid external barriers?

It’s hard. I can admit that, and I wish more people did publicly. I know a lot of people talk about how hard it is behind the scenes, but I wish more people also talked about how difficult it is to want your music to sustain yourself artistically and emotionally, but also financially. It’s so draining, and it just creates so many more barriers than I could have ever imagined when I’d first started making music.

There’s a lot of pressure with shows, for sure. I feel the need to do a good job so people want to book me. It’s difficult because to me, what people perceive as worth seeing is extremely limited. I think a lot of unconventional performances are so interesting and deserving of an audience. That’s the biggest barrier for me, and it’s the one that I’m trying the hardest to break. Going on tour, actually, was a bit of an experiment for me to figure out what was registering with people: finding that equilibrium between what you want and what your audience wants. It’s tough in a million ways. I’m still learning.

In spite of how entrenched these limitations can feel, it’s awe-inspiring how you continue to maintain the integrity of such a genuinely self-realized creative process. Do you have advice for anyone struggling with feeling inauthentic in their creative output?

Stop pandering and do whatever you want. Let’s just say nobody ever wants to hear anything else I do again and I’m just self-releasing for no one except my sister, begrudgingly: at least I can say with utmost confidence that my work has integrity, and that I put everything I wanted to into the music.

Stick to your gut and don’t worry so much about what people have to say. That agency is so hard to find in other places within the music industry, so you should at least feel like you have as much agency as possible. I always wonder, who knows what’s going to happen after? I might as well feel like everything I’m doing right now is exactly what I want to do.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Sue Park.

As thousands of people gathered at pro-choice rallies across the United States, multiple congresswomen marked the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade on Sunday by sharing their own experiences with abortion care and renewing calls to protect reproductive rights in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court reversing its landmark ruling.

"I'm one of the 1 in 4 women in America who has had an abortion. Terminating my pregnancy was not an easy choice, but more importantly, it was MY choice," tweeted Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who has previously shared her story in a New York Timesopinion piece and during a House hearing.

"Everyone's story is different, but I know this for certain: The choice to have an abortion belongs to pregnant people, not the government. We are not free if we cannot make these fundamental choices about our bodies," she continued. "MAGA Republicans' extreme abortion bans aren't about saving lives, they're about control. We must stand up and fight these bans. Together."

Fellow Washington state Democrat Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez, who was sworn in for her first term earlier this month, wrote on Twitter: "Three years ago I miscarried in the second trimester of a pregnancy. It's a painful memory but something many women have experienced. I traveled hours to the nearest clinic, and I encountered anti-choice protesters. Thankfully I got the care I needed that day."

"I had been told without an immediate abortion, or dilation and evacuation, that my life was at risk. That I could die, or not be able to have children in the future. I got the care I needed, and now I'm the mother of my 17-month-old son," she said. "On what would've been Roe v. Wade's 50th anniversary, I'm thinking of the millions of Americans with stories like mine who are forced to go without access to safe reproductive care. I won't stop fighting to restore this fundamental right and defend reproductive freedom for all."

Nearly seven months since the high court's right-wing majority overturned Roe with Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, "abortion is currently unavailable in 14 states, and courts have temporarily blocked enforcement of bans in eight others," according to a December review by the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute, which tracks state laws.

Just after the Dobbs decision leaked last May, Ellepublished a roundtable discussion with the only five then-members of Congress who had publicly shared abortion stories: Jayapal; Sen. Gary Peters, whose ex-wife got a potentially lifesaving emergency abortion in the 1980s; and Reps. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), and Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), who did not seek reelection last year.

In the weeks that followed, Reps. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) and Marie Newman (D-Ill.)—who lost her June primary after redistricting—also detailed their abortions when they were each 19 years old. During a House hearing, Rep. Lucy McBath (D-Ga.) shared that "when my doctor finally induced me, I faced the pain of labor without hope for a living child."

"Would it have been after the first miscarriage, after doctors used what would be an illegal drug to abort the lost fetus?" McBath asked. "Would you have put me in jail after the second miscarriage?"

McBath took to Twitter Sunday to highlight that testimony and warn that "without Roe, all reproductive care is on the line."

Bush—who has spoken about seeking an abortion after becoming pregnant as a result of rape at 17—said in a statement Sunday that "the Roe v. Wade decision was not only historic in that it protected people accessing abortions; it also served as precedent for several more court cases and laws to follow that would further advance gender equality, reproductive rights, and our collective freedoms."

"Unfortunately, we all know what happened last June. Republicans spent decades stacking the federal judiciary with far-right anti-abortion judges and successfully stripped millions of people of their right to safe, legal, and accessible abortion care, particularly Black, Brown, LGBTQ+, and other marginalized communities," she said. "And, let's be clear, Republicans aren't stopping with Roe."

"In just their first couple of days in power, House Republicans passed two anti-abortion bills in a blatant attempt to lay the groundwork for a national abortion ban," added Bush, who was among the 17 federal lawmakers arrested in July while protesting Dobbs at the Supreme Court. "As a congresswoman, a mother, a pastor, and as a person who has had abortions, I will never stop fighting for a person's bodily autonomy, reproductive rights, and for a country that lives up to its proclamation of freedom."

Moore—who represents a state where abortion is now unavailable due to a contested 1849 ban—issued a similar warning in a series of tweets, declaring that "this Roe anniversary is a reminder of what we've lost, and we must fight for a future that creates more equitable healthcare access for all."

"The chaos we've seen over the past six months is the environment anti-abortion politicians have worked for decades to create, and they won't stop with Roe. While we work to protect and restore access to abortion, more attacks on sexual and reproductive health are happening now," she said. "The path ahead will be challenging. It will require us to think bolder than ever before to ensure our very basic rights and freedoms are permanently protected—not subject to whoever happens to be in power."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

As thousands of people gathered at pro-choice rallies across the United States, multiple congresswomen marked the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade on Sunday by sharing their own experiences with abortion care and renewing calls to protect reproductive rights in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court reversing its landmark ruling.

"I'm one of the 1 in 4 women in America who has had an abortion. Terminating my pregnancy was not an easy choice, but more importantly, it was MY choice," tweeted Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who has previously shared her story in a New York Timesopinion piece and during a House hearing.

"Everyone's story is different, but I know this for certain: The choice to have an abortion belongs to pregnant people, not the government. We are not free if we cannot make these fundamental choices about our bodies," she continued. "MAGA Republicans' extreme abortion bans aren't about saving lives, they're about control. We must stand up and fight these bans. Together."

Fellow Washington state Democrat Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez, who was sworn in for her first term earlier this month, wrote on Twitter: "Three years ago I miscarried in the second trimester of a pregnancy. It's a painful memory but something many women have experienced. I traveled hours to the nearest clinic, and I encountered anti-choice protesters. Thankfully I got the care I needed that day."

"I had been told without an immediate abortion, or dilation and evacuation, that my life was at risk. That I could die, or not be able to have children in the future. I got the care I needed, and now I'm the mother of my 17-month-old son," she said. "On what would've been Roe v. Wade's 50th anniversary, I'm thinking of the millions of Americans with stories like mine who are forced to go without access to safe reproductive care. I won't stop fighting to restore this fundamental right and defend reproductive freedom for all."

Nearly seven months since the high court's right-wing majority overturned Roe with Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, "abortion is currently unavailable in 14 states, and courts have temporarily blocked enforcement of bans in eight others," according to a December review by the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute, which tracks state laws.

Just after the Dobbs decision leaked last May, Ellepublished a roundtable discussion with the only five then-members of Congress who had publicly shared abortion stories: Jayapal; Sen. Gary Peters, whose ex-wife got a potentially lifesaving emergency abortion in the 1980s; and Reps. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), and Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), who did not seek reelection last year.

In the weeks that followed, Reps. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) and Marie Newman (D-Ill.)—who lost her June primary after redistricting—also detailed their abortions when they were each 19 years old. During a House hearing, Rep. Lucy McBath (D-Ga.) shared that "when my doctor finally induced me, I faced the pain of labor without hope for a living child."

"Would it have been after the first miscarriage, after doctors used what would be an illegal drug to abort the lost fetus?" McBath asked. "Would you have put me in jail after the second miscarriage?"

McBath took to Twitter Sunday to highlight that testimony and warn that "without Roe, all reproductive care is on the line."

Bush—who has spoken about seeking an abortion after becoming pregnant as a result of rape at 17—said in a statement Sunday that "the Roe v. Wade decision was not only historic in that it protected people accessing abortions; it also served as precedent for several more court cases and laws to follow that would further advance gender equality, reproductive rights, and our collective freedoms."

"Unfortunately, we all know what happened last June. Republicans spent decades stacking the federal judiciary with far-right anti-abortion judges and successfully stripped millions of people of their right to safe, legal, and accessible abortion care, particularly Black, Brown, LGBTQ+, and other marginalized communities," she said. "And, let's be clear, Republicans aren't stopping with Roe."

"In just their first couple of days in power, House Republicans passed two anti-abortion bills in a blatant attempt to lay the groundwork for a national abortion ban," added Bush, who was among the 17 federal lawmakers arrested in July while protesting Dobbs at the Supreme Court. "As a congresswoman, a mother, a pastor, and as a person who has had abortions, I will never stop fighting for a person's bodily autonomy, reproductive rights, and for a country that lives up to its proclamation of freedom."

Moore—who represents a state where abortion is now unavailable due to a contested 1849 ban—issued a similar warning in a series of tweets, declaring that "this Roe anniversary is a reminder of what we've lost, and we must fight for a future that creates more equitable healthcare access for all."

"The chaos we've seen over the past six months is the environment anti-abortion politicians have worked for decades to create, and they won't stop with Roe. While we work to protect and restore access to abortion, more attacks on sexual and reproductive health are happening now," she said. "The path ahead will be challenging. It will require us to think bolder than ever before to ensure our very basic rights and freedoms are permanently protected—not subject to whoever happens to be in power."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

© Photo credit: National Digital Archives, Polan

Did you know that Adolph Hitler named his special personal World War II train Amerika?

I ran across this interesting fact while leafing through the British historian Martin Gilbert’s massive history of the Second World War.

Some might find this strange, given the fact that Hitler’s Third Reich was formally at war with the United States between December 8, 1941, and April May 7, 1945.

I did some research on this curious nomenclature and quickly determined that it was exactly as I suspected. As the military enthusiast website We Are the Mighty reports:

“Hitler, oddly enough, seemed obsessed with America in many ways. He admired [fellow anti-Semite] Henry Ford and American industrialization. He liked American films and Mickey Mouse cartoons. And, perhaps most oddly for a man of Hitler’s obsession with perception and propaganda, he even named his rolling fortress of a train after the rival country, calling it ‘Amerika.’”

What was that name about? Precisely what I thought: “it wasn’t out of respect for the American nation or people. Hitler named the train for the destruction of Native Americans by western settlers” (emphasis added).

(Hitler switched to The Brandenburg in 1943, by which time US forces had engaged Third Reich troops in North Africa and Western Europe.)

It’s not so odd, after all. As scholars of German fascism have long known and as is clear from Hitler’s sickening memoir Mein Kampf, the genocidal Nazi dictator drew inspiration and lessons from the “democratic” United States.  He admired and envied not only (the United States of) “America’s” near-extermination of its Indigenous peoples but also its long history of Black chattel slavery, its racist Jim Crow segregation laws and practices, its rugged and violent frontier spirit, its breakneck industrialization, its pioneering mass production methods, its vast network of roads and rail lines, and the propagandistic power of its movie and radio industries. Intimately linked to his quest for racist German-imperial Lebensraum (“breathing room”) in Eastern Europe and Russia, Hitler wanted to replicate “America’s” racialized ethnic cleansing campaigns, slave practices, industrialization, and mass transport across Eurasia. The United States was a great role model for his fascist and genocidal vision.

As Third Reich forces marched into the Soviet Union in July of 1941, Hitler “made it clear that he was not contemplating anything resembling a semi-enlightened form of colonialism, which might include a modicum of decent treatment of the conquered people.  They would be subjugated mercilessly,” writes Adam Nagorski in his book 1941: The Year Germany Lost the War (2019). The goal, in Hitler’s words, was “to Germanize this country by the immigration of Germans and look upon the natives as redskins…In this business, I shall go ahead cold-bloodedly.”

Yes, you read that correctly: “look upon the natives as redskins” – this said by Hitler as he was riding around in a train named after his national historical exemplar, the United States of Amerika.

For some chilling accounts of cold-blooded native extermination by white “settlers” seeking Lebensraum on the 17th-19th Century North American Frontier, see my November 23, 2022 Paul Street Report, sub-titled “A Little Matter of Genocide.”

(Perhaps young Hitler, a voracious reader, came upon Theodore Roosevelt’s noxious multi-volume celebration of American genocide, The Winning of the West. “American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander and Maori, – in each case the victor,” The Winning of the West instructed, “horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people…It is of incalculable importance,” Roosevelt opined, “that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races…The world would have halted had it not been for the Teutonic conquests in alien lands…”)

An Ex-President Dining with Fellow Hitler Fans

Speaking of fascism and the United States, Donald Trump two weeks ago scandalously hosted a Mar a Lago dinner with the Black fascist lunatic “Ye” (the demented rapper formerly known as Kanye West) and the white supremacist Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.  Trump, now an open supporter of the neo-Nazi QAnon cult, has offered no apology for this wicked gathering, preposterously claiming not to have known anything about who Fuentes is or his politics. More “mainstream” Republi-fascist Trump-enablers have played along with this ridiculous claim, with the next US House Speaker and slithering reptile Kevin McCarthy (Rf-CA) adding the false assertion that “President Trump came out four times and condemned [Fuentes].”

Here’s some of what Trump’s other dinner partner Ye said to the flummoxed right-wing conspiracy monger Alex Jones last week: “I see good things about Hitler… Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler….Also, Hitler was born Christian.”

Yes, you read that correctly: “especially Hitler.”

We learned in 1990 from his ex-wife Ivana that Trump kept a collection of Hitler’s speeches in his bedside table in the 1980s. Recall also that Trump as president angrily asked his early chief of staff John Kelly why the US military brass didn’t line up in “totally loyal” obedience to him “like the German generals” under the Third Reich.

Perhaps Hitler’s “good things” were topics of discussion during the Trump-Ye-Fuentes supper. If so, it was consistent with his presidency.  As I show in my latest book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America, US capitalism-imperialism shat an actual fascist, however sloppy and narcissistic, into the world’s most dangerous job between January 20, 2017, and January 20, 2021. (See chapters two and three of This Happened Here, titled “The Fascist Wolf Defined and Foretold,” and “A Fascist in the White House, 2017-21.”)[1]

If you think it – a fascist in the White House – can’t happen here again, very possibly with a different, less clumsy, and younger fascist (Ron DeSantis) in the top job, please see my last Paul Street Report here. By the way, The New York Times reported last week that blatantly anti-Semitic hate speech and references to fascist “Great Replacement Theory” have “soared” on Twitter since the fascist billionaire Elon Musk took that platform over and loosened its restrictions on hate speech. Musk wants Trump to return to the venue.  He wants to highlight “view count” on every tweet, something that will mean more attention-grabbing shocking and inflammatory posts.

“The Termination of All Rules…Even Those in the Constitution”

More evidence that the nation’s 45th POTUS was a fascist came last Saturday. In a post on his Orwellian social network Truth Social, Herr Trump for the first time added an explicit call to “set aside the supreme law of the land” (in the Times’ accurate words) to his ludicrous claim that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen.” Demanding that the last election be overturned or re-run, Trump or (more likely) one of his hacks (the language is a bit too complex for Trump’s brain) wrote this: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

Read that again.  I am not making it up: “the termination of all rules…even those found in the Constitution.” That’s an actual statement from the demented maniac who still qualifies as the post-republican Republikaner Party’s 2024 presidential front runner even if Ron DeSantis is closing fast on Trump.

“Lawlessness in the name of law and order” is a classic calling card of fascism, as the Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley pointed out years ago.

After the media shit-storm this latest wild Trump elicited, the twice-impeached ex-President absurdly declared that he still supported the US Constitution. He did this while standing by his preposterous demand that the 2020-election should be re-run or he be returned to power, both of which would require …termination of the US Constitution.

Perhaps federal prosecutors will at some point next year ask Trump if he has ever called for the end of the nation’s cherished constitution.

Minus some mild criticism from the Christian white nationalist Mike Pence (the guy Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump thought should “maybe” be hanged by fascist thugs on January 6, 2021) and the longtime Trump-enabling Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), the  Republi-fascist establishment has been chillingly quiet in response to Trump’s explicit calls for the end of bourgeois democracy and rule of law. The House Speaker elect McCarthy and the Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Rf-KY) have yet to say a single word about Trump’s termination comment.

Where Orange Thing Should but Won’t Spend Its Final Days

Chances are rising that Trump will be indicted for one or more glaring felonies, including perhaps seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government and violation of the Espionage Act. As is rarely if ever noted in the mainstream media, both charges potentially carry the death penalty.

While I’m not a believer in capital punishment, I do think it would be entirely fitting for the deranged putschist Trump to spend his last years (or, preferably, months or weeks or days) on federal Death Row in Terre Haute, cowering in the shadow of the execution chambers that he started up again. The sadistic Trump administration rushed to make sure that a number of federal executions were carried out before he left office.

Among Trump’s many crimes, one is now rarely if ever mentioned: pandemicide, whereby Trump killed well more than a hundred thousand US-Americans through his bizarre and sickening covid denialism and inaction.

The execution of a former US president is of course unimaginable. Even incarceration is inconceivable – a precedent the US ruling class never wants to set for the presidency, whose imperial duties require the regular commission of massive crimes against humanity or at least the ever-present readiness to commit such crimes.

Trump Should Thank the Founders

One among many rich ironies in the “terminate the constitution” story is that Trump owes his initial election to the US presidency, his ability to stay in office, and (perhaps) his right to run again for the White House to the nation’s absurdly venerated 18th Century constitution.  It was thanks in great part to the ancient charter’s archaic Electoral College, which overrepresents the nation’s most reactionary states and reduces serious presidential campaigning to a small number of contested states, that the widely hated fascist pig Trump was able to become president after losing the popular vote by three million tallies to the highly unpopular and depressing neoliberal elitist Hillary Clinton. The constitutionally imposed minority rule malapportionment of the US Senate, which grossly overrepresents the nation’s most reactionary regions and voters, prevented Trump from being properly convicted and removed from office after his two US House impeachments.  And conviction, richly deserved in both cases, would have blocked him from running again (though here it should be admitted that Trump is now at serious risk of felony convictions that could accomplish this in 2023 or 2024).

We Do Need a New Constitution…After a Revolution

The Democrats have hardly distinguished themselves in their response to the tangerine-tinted tyrant’s terrible termination-ism.  They have belched up the usual sanctimonious paeans to the supposed greatness of the nation’s militantly anti-democratic and propertarian 18th Century slaveowners’ charter, whose deeply reactionary nature I have (with no special claim to originality) broken down again, again, again, again, and again some more (I literally lack the time and energy to link all the essays I have published on this topic — here’s a more recent one). . It is unimaginable to them that We the People might want to step outside the killing confines of this antiquated and deeply conservative straight-jacket on democracy, designed by and for slaveowners, landed gentry, merchant capitalists and publicists for whom popular sovereignty was the ultimate nightmare.

Strange as it may sound to say, Trump is on to something in his call for the termination of the Constitution. It is long past time for the transcendence of this charter not by fascist perversion but rather by a socialist constitution that abolishes the soulless and exterminist class rule system that is capitalism-imperialism, the taproot of the four great mutually multiplying and apocalyptic horsemen of our time: ecocide, pandemicide, potentially nuclear global war, and fascism.

And believe it or not, a draft version of the constitution required has already been written by the Revolutionary Communist Party’s leader Bob Avakian.  Read it here. Don’t like it? Write a better one. Seriously.  It’s important to have an alternative revolutionary socialist charter in place: (a) to construct and guide a genuine people’s  revolution built (unlike the socialist revolutions of the last century) to last and to spread to other nations; (b) to answer those who constantly nag Marxist and other radicals with the false allegation that “you’re only against stuff but you offer no alternatives, you’re not for anything.” Here’s an accurate translation of that false charge: “you propose alternatives that threaten us, so we claim they don’t exist.”

Just to be clear, the point of socialist constitution-drafting is not to wave a document around as if it itself is a magical answer to all our problems. A revolutionary charter like the one linked above could only be established after a dedicated, organized, and successful mass popular uprising conducted to liberate humanity from the unelected and eco-cidal class dictatorship of capital and the intimately related oppression structures of race, gender, empire, and theocracy.

“Why You Wanna Walk Around With Me?”

Back to the Democrats, who are deeply complicit in the creeping fascisation of the United States. Like any other actual US “radical Leftist,” I am so T-I-R-E-D of Bernie Sanders (please no emails denying that the “independent” Senator from Vermont is in fact and essence a Democrat). Kudos to CounterPunch editor Jeffrey St. Clair for the following dead-on reflection on how Sanders sickeningly tried to preserve his progressive brand identity while enabling bipartisan ruling class Congressional legislation enlisting the federal government as the pre-emptive breaker of a long- overdue strike by the nation’s badly overworked rail workers:

“The question as always with Bernie Sanders is what was he willing to do about it? Would he filibuster the strikebreaking bill? Or simply initiate a distraction by offering a sick leave bill he knew had no chance of becoming law? The latter, of course. Which he rationalized as a victory, even when it went down to defeat: ‘I’m proud that the House of Representatives passed legislation to guarantee seven days of paid sick leave for all rail workers. While I’m disappointed that we were unable to get the 60 votes we needed in the Senate, we did receive the votes of every Senate Democrat, but one, as well as six Republicans.’”

More from St. Clair, broadening his critique to the entire Democratic Party:

“Here are the EIGHT House Dems who voted against the strike-busting rail worker bill…Rep. Norma Torres (CA-35); Rep. Rashida Tlaib (MI-13); Rep. Mary Peltola (AK-01); Rep. Mark Pocan (WI-02); Rep. Donald Norcross (NJ-01); Rep. Jared Golden (ME-02); Rep. Mark DeSaulnier (CA-11); Rep. Judy Chu (CA-27)

Has any party ever said ‘Fuck You’ to its base more forcefully (or repeatedly)? I’m reminded of the Ramones song…‘I don’t wanna walk around with you/I don’t wanna walk around with you/I don’t wanna walk around with you/So why you wanna walk around with me?’”

That’s a perfect musical reference for how the dismal, dollar-drenched Dems repeatedly and regularly betray the nation’s working- and lower-class majority in service to their corporate and financial overlords.

Lucy and Charlie Yet Again: “Sleeping Car Joe” and “Socialist” Bernie Know How the Ruling Class Senate “Works”

An equally apt popular cultural reference for the ruling class Dems’ pathological relationship with their base is a bit stodgier. It’s the old Charles Schultz Peanuts cartoon wherein Lucy keeps pulling the football away just as poor Charlie Brown is about to kick it for an imaginary field goal.  “Gosh darn,” Charlie lamely says over and over, “she did it again” (my paraphrase).

Did Bernie really think we don’t know that the filibusted, half-Republican US Senate would of course block his and the lame duck Democratic majority House’s sick-leave bill – this even as he would never dare to filibuster the strikebreaking bill? Seriously?

But, then, did “our” strikebreaking president Sleeping Car Joe Biden really think we didn’t know that same filibusted half-Republican body would of course block his absurdly promised bill to codify Roe v. Wade as national law if the Dems’ had kept the House in the midterm elections? How transparently disingenuous was it for him to follow up last month’s mid-term elections by saying that the Democrats wouldn’t have the House votes for him to move on his preposterous pre-election pledge after all?  Please. He knows damn well how the Senate “works.”  It was all a ruse, straight out of Peanuts.

(Caveat: come to think of it, Biden and his good friend Sanders probably DO know very well that most citizens in “the world’s greatest democracy” do NOT in fact know how “their” government works and are therefore unaware that bills passed by the House can’t become laws without 60 votes in the grossly malapportioned, deeply reactionary, and absurdly powerful Senate.)

“Despicable But Not Surprising”

Some instructive words from Railroad Workers United in a press release after the latest Lucy game was played on the rail unions by Amerikan state capitalism:

“Railroad Workers United (RWU) finds it despicable – but not surprising – that both political parties opted to side with Big Business over working people yesterday and vote against the interests of railroad workers – not once, but twice, within hours. We suffered a one-two punch at the hands of, first the Democratic Party; second the Republicans…First, responding to the wishes of President Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the House voted to legislate a contract that the majority of U.S. freight rail workers had previously voted to reject. The Senate would quickly follow suit. In effect, their actions simply overrode our voices and desires. Rail workers – like all workers – should have the right to bargain collectively and to freely engage in strike activity if and when the members see fit and when they democratically elect to do so…Within hours of the Senate vote sealing our fate on Thursday afternoon [came]… a second defeat, this at the hands of the other party of Big Business, the Republican Party. That bill – which would have mandated that all railroad workers receive seven days of paid sick leave – would receive just a handful of votes from Republicans in the House and, crucially, in the Senate, where it went down to defeat… ‘This one-two punch from the two political parties is despicable,’ according to RWU General Secretary Jason Doering. ‘Politicians are happy to voice platitudes and heap praise upon us for our heroism throughout the pandemic, the essential nature of our work, the difficult and dangerous and demanding conditions of our jobs. Yet when the steel hits the rail, they back the powerful and wealthy class every time’” (emphasis added).

Indeed. Welcome to the class dictatorship of capital. Strike anyway? (A revolutionary one big rail-workers union would, consistent with the legacies of the great US Socialist Eugene Debs and the IWW.)

Please Raise Your Sights

The liberal celebration over last Tuesday’s Senate run-off election in Georgia is over the top. Listening to liberal and progressive friends the last few days, you’d think some sort of great transformative breakthrough had occurred.

Don’t get me wrong. I get and share their relief that someone as morally and intellectually low as Herschel Walker won’t be a US Senator, to be sure, but: the Congress as a whole (with the Republifascists about to take over the lower chamber) is a stalemated ruling-class clusterf**k; the Supreme Court is a Christian fascist nightmare; millions upon millions of women face the terror and bondage of forced motherhood under the vile Dobbs v. Jackson decision (this even as liberals cynically and/or foolishly claim that the mid-terms were “Roevember” ffs); Sleeping Car Joe and the Dems (including numerous “socialist” Squad members) are state-capitalist strikebreakers (!); there is next to nothing being done to save livable ecology (just the biggest issue of our or any time) or slash the military budget…and..I could go on.

Walker was such an abysmally awful, stupid, and reactionary, CTE-damaged Christian fascist reptile of a candidate that it’s kind of hard to feel all that great about his defeat when one realizes that this open revanchist freak came within 1.6% or 3% of the polished liberal Raphael Warnock. It is horrifying to contemplate how close this moral and intellectual arch-troglodyte came to taking up a seat in the US Senate.

Democrats, including some lovely “progressives” I know, doing cartwheels over Georgia, is symptomatic of how depressed “left” expectations are today.

This lowering of portside sights is depressing and dangerous.

I have seen progressives arguing about the railroad legislation and strike. Biden should have done this, Bernie should have done that. People go on and on after each other about what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did or didn’t do or say.

Let me be blunt: who cares? There are no solutions to the grave existential problems of our time under the systemic death trip that is capitalism-imperialism. None. Repeat after me: This system’s elected officials and politicos Will. Not. Save. Us. Fellow workers, citizens and comrades, listen up: we’ve got maybe a decade to get out from under the insane ecocide, pandemical, fascism-generating and imperialist war-mongering racist sexist capitalist system or we can pretty much stick our collective heads between our collective legs and kiss our collective ass goodbye.

Please think bigger. Think systems. Think radical reconstruction of society as a whole. Think deeply about what it would take to make and keep and spread a many-sided people’s socialist revolution to put humanity on a path to real liberation. What other basic goal is there?

Rail workers: take the lesson from the corporate duopoly and become revolutionary socialists fighting as “tribunes of the people” (The Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin’s excellent phrase) against class rule and against all forms of oppression. Think political strikes, not just economic ones for more under the existing lethal order — many-sided political strikes and much more heading towards a new and better egalitarian social order consciously designed in the real material, social, psychological, cultural, biological, personal, collective, and dare I say spiritual interests of the preponderant majority of humanity — a species that comes to grasp its interdependent relationships and place within the broader web of life.

On this “radical” (ordinary common sense to the present writer since age 19) final note, please listen to this remarkable 24-minute speech by Charlie Kimber, National Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party of the United Kingdom: “Time’s Running Out: Leninism in a Time of Crisis.” “Without revolution,” Kimber says, “we are looking in fairly short order at the strong possibility of the extirpation or the elimination of everything that matters, including the whole of humanity.” He’s right.

(Thank you to Cole Miller for sending me this speech. More on this extraordinary oration in a future Paul Street Report, when time and word count allow.)

Notes

1. So I argued in real time against scoffing and usually older white male “progressives” and “Marxists.” These insufferable clowns inspired my surprisingly useful invention of the term “Trumpenleft” by foolishly accusing those of us radicals who dared to identify the homegrown Amerikaner fascism staring the nation in the face as fascism of (a) “crying wolf, (b) “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” and (c) alliance with the dismal Democrats, who we were accusing of complicity with the fascisation of US politics. It’s a shame more Germans didn’t develop “Hitler Derangement Syndrome” during the 1930s.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Paul Street.

I think it took a while to figure out what I wanted to make and what was actually exciting to me. Things started to click when I was in LA. I definitely don’t think I was making what I needed to make for myself when I was in school. I think that part of being in school is being in a bubble, where you’re too aware of your audience. It wasn’t until maybe five years after school that I started making work that was really the work that I wanted to see, that really felt good to me. And naturally that’s when people started responding to it.

I don’t think it’s good to be too aware of your audience—it’s limiting to know what everyone’s taste is and what they’re drawn to. I was also so aware of the fact that I would have to stand in front of the work, and explain it, and then explaining your work is what kills it. I mean, it’s called a visual language for a reason.

So in school I started making work that explained itself in a very metaphorical way. I made these self-destructing, rotating ornament sculptures, and these weird light box paintings. It’s funny because that is sort of a part of my practice now. I occasionally make lightbox paintings.

Criss, 2022, oil on linen, 84 x 68 x 1 1/8 inches (213.4 x 172.7 x 2.9 cm), Photo: Elon Schoenholz, Copyright The Artist (Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery)

I was going to ask you if you thought about working in a different medium. It sounds like that is something you’re experimenting with.

I like different formats, but I do feel like it’s always painting. Even when I was in college, I dabbled in making videos, but they were always from a very painterly approach. They had a painterly kind of tactility, and they were very abstract. I think my approach is just always as a painter.

In writing about your work, critics often relate your painting to cinema. How do you feel about that comparison?

Film is probably what inspires me most. It’s my biggest hobby. It’s also my favorite thinking space. I love going to the movies and being in a crowd of strangers with the lights out, surrounded by color. Afterwards, I always have so many ideas- usually intangible sensations that I want to explore. The mere attempt to translate those fleeting sensations can be a starting point for me.

What films have you thought most about recently?

I recently saw Arnaud Desplechin’s My Sex Life… Or How I Got Into an Argument, but that one’s a more unusual one for me, because it’s so dialogue heavy. And then the most recent transcendental moviegoing experience I have had was seeing Zulueta’s Arrebato (Rapture). My boyfriend and I saw it in 35mm at New Bev, one of my favorite theaters. Afterwards we were both completely floored. [We were] almost shaking. I felt like the movie turned in on itself and I became one of the characters—it became my rapture. It’s very meta. It’s one of those movies that I don’t think I’ll ever watch again, because the experience was so perfect that I need to preserve it.

When you’re painting, what are the feelings that are most important to you, or most interesting to you?

It’s more about channeling the ambiguous or the unknown. Whenever I try to put it into words what each painting is and what I see in them, it’s never exactly right. It’s most exciting when they stir a multitude of associations. Trying to explain them feels limiting.

Some of my paintings have a quieter, slower sort of peacefulness, and others have more violent chaos to them. And both are interesting to me. I like having a variety. It’s all very intuitive.

17:31, 2022, oil on linen, 69 1/8 x 48 1/8 x 1 1/8 inches (175.6 x 122.2 x 2.9 cm), Photo: Elon Schoenholz, Copyright The Artist (Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery)

Do you feel like there’s a correlation between your inner life and what you’re painting? Or does it feel separate, more unknown to you?

Well, when I’m making them, there’s this dance between subconscious, intuitive, spontaneous mark-making, and then more reflective, meditative honing in, a pulling out of different sensations or associations.

And then eventually my taste ends up being what affects my judgment of when it is the right time to finish. There’s always this sense of, “Oh, I could push it forever, but it’ll just be something different.” I usually like to stop right at the moment that everything opens up.

Do you ever abandon work? How do you decide that something isn’t working?

No. I always just continue to work on it. But, actually, that’s how I arrived at the vocabulary of mark-making that I have. At one point, it was a much more shallow network of marks, rather than being so layered. I was working on this book for Onestar Press, and it was all black and white. That’s their format. I started doing more paintings in monochrome, and it really pushed the range of marks that I could use.

When I started introducing color back in, more depth opened up. It just got so much more compelling and so then I started layering on top of older paintings, or paintings that I’d already been working on at the time. The paintings started to have a more interwoven landscape of marks.

There was just a lot of experimentation that led to where I’m at now.

What signals the start of a painting? Are there initial images that you begin with?

No, never. Sometimes, there could be a lighting scenario that I recall, or certain colors I want to use, but then I quickly abandon that. Usually I just start painting.

So there’s a physical relationship to the work, and then it goes outward from there.

It is more process-oriented than people think. I just throw myself into it. In some paintings, the start is really important. Certain layers might get buried, but they always inform what comes next. Sometimes it can be frustrating in the beginning, but eventually something happens.

How do you deal with that frustration, even on a practical level?

I like to have a lot of paintings kicking at the same time. Usually I’ll have three or more paintings going. It’s easy to get tunnel vision if I’m only working on one or two. I feel like I get trapped in looking at it in a very specific kind of way. And sometimes I’ll go in that direction for too long, and look back at different photos that I took throughout the process, and be like, “God damn it. I really had something there.” And so, if I have more than one painting going, I’ll be able to reset my eyes a bit more. I’ll only work on one each day usually, or flip between two. And I like to work long stretches of time.

But it helps to have a break between encounters. Depending on your mood, you’ll look at a painting completely differently.

22:52, 2022, oil on linen, 130 x 64 x 1 5/8 inches (330.2 x 162.6 x 4.1 cm), Copyright The Artist (Courtesy of the Artist and David Kordansky Gallery)

What’s your daily schedule?

For the last four months I had a really rigorous painting schedule. Every day I’d try to wake up, work out, and then have coffee, and then go, and just start painting. And then after that I’ll go to the movies. That’s my favorite kind of break. Or get dinner with someone or just work late into the night. Sometimes the hours get weird, but I do like working really late at night, when no one’s going to bother me.

Do you have a separate studio?

Yes. But I’m soon going to live and work in the same place, which I’m really excited to do, because it’s worked for me in the past. I end up living at my studio anyway, and I’d rather have everything combined. Like during the beginning of COVID, I worked in the alley of my apartment. I liked that a lot.

How do you handle a deadline when it is approaching?

I think that the key is just having a regular routine. And I think it’s really important to be able to take breaks. I like to have at least a day off a week, and I like to go to the beach. Everything feels better when you come back after that day.

Have you ever tried other schedules that didn’t work for you?

I mean, I do find it hard to work when I’m traveling. I don’t know. I’m addicted to painting, and if I take too much time away, I feel guilty. I try to sleep as much as I can, and then get there as soon as I can. It’s important to maintain momentum.

Speaking of sleeping—your works feel very dreamlike to me. Is there a connection between your dreams and what you paint?

I don’t really remember my dreams all that well, and I know that I could try out that notebook method, and train myself to remember more. But, yeah, you could say my paintings function like dreamscapes. And the way that I relate and respond to the paintings is similar to dreaming…The human brain always wants to find the face, or make sense of the chaos. Things will appear in your dreams, related to your everyday life, but they surface in weird ways-your dreams are an abstraction. I do feel like there is a subconscious element to the work.

Do you feel like there are times in your life where it’s harder to access the subconscious side?

I think that I am almost too abstract sometimes in the way that I respond to things. And it’s funny, when you’re painting, it’s almost like you’re turning off part of your brain. And so, sometimes it’s hard to switch gears, but that’s because I feel like I’m so trained to access a certain kind of spontaneity and impulse.

It’s interesting because even though your relationship to your own work is very intuitive, you’ve also done these other curatorial projects, which would seem to require a different kind of mental space.

But I have more of an intuitive curatorial process as well. [I work with] certain artists that I have an affinity towards, and who probably work in a similar way. A lot of them have an automatic process.

21:13, 2022, oil on linen, 112 1/4 x 51 x 1 5/8 inches (285.1 x 129.5 x 4.1 cm), Copyright The Artist (Courtesy of the Artist and David Kordansky Gallery)

How do you choose where to stage your curatorial work? Your shows are always really inventively situated. The Desk project, for example.

From the Desk of Lucy Bull started as a venue because I hurt my hand. I couldn’t paint that week so I figured I could finally start working on a program of sorts. I really wanted to create a more intimate environment for viewing art. And so, for a while, I’d been thinking about doing something in my apartment. At the time, I was in East Hollywood, and it was a small studio, and I had very little furniture, because I was using it as both a painting studio and a bedroom.

And I stripped it down, and made it as much of a clean, white cube as possible. I had old paintings stored in the stairwell going up, and in the kitchen. For the openings, I would move my current works in progress into the kitchen. It was ridiculous, honestly. I can’t even believe I did this. And I had this repurposed door that had a metal coating. I found it in Venice. I eventually made it into this low coffee table, and it was the only table that I had. And so, it was my “desk.” I was thinking about how diners would display ephemera or menus under the glass of tables. It felt like the obvious location for bringing people together.

It had a built-in intimacy, which I liked.

What about the car project, Crash?

That was really fun.

I wanted to do something with my friend Alex Metcalf, and she had been reaching out to me, and I was sort of in the midst of a lot of painting, and working on an upcoming show. But I just finally saw a window, and Frieze was happening in LA, so the timing couldn’t have been better.

And she made this amazing chandelier, and her boyfriend helped us figure out how to mount it in the car without drilling through the top. I think I had six stops on the first day, so it was stressful moving around, but it was really cool. Like a traveling living room. I highlighted certain galleries of the LA scene. It was another intimate environment where you could just spend some time around the art. The car is strangely domestic.

I like your focus on community. Do you have people that you talk with about your art practice, or do you keep it private?

I really love talking to my friends who are not artists, or not painters. For the most part I think that it’s more interesting to talk about art with non-artists, because they’ll be a lot more candid about how they’re relating and responding…less shop talk.

Do you have bad habits?

I’ve quit smoking, thankfully. I’m trying to think about what it would be in terms of art-making. I think it’s important to switch things up and avoid getting too comfortable with working in any specific sort of way.

Maybe my bad habit would be not taking enough breaks. Not getting enough fresh air.

I think it’s easy to get stressed and lose sight of how you’re actually doing your work. My dream, basically, is painting. My dream has always been to be a painter. Sometimes I have to remind myself, “Have fun,” and not to stress out.

I’ve learned to fight against the stress. In a way, the pressure is good, and always productive, but sometimes I can get carried away with the productivity side of it.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Claudia Ross.

Here is CPJ’s briefing on the deteriorating conditions for Ethiopia’s journalists, the context of the crackdown, and recommendations to improve the country’s climate for press freedom.

What’s behind the hostility toward the media?

Ethiopian journalists are no strangers to repression. Ethiopia used to be one of the world’s most-censored countries. Under the Abiy administration and the previous TPLF-led administrations, they have experienced internet shutdowns and had anti-terror laws used against them.

Now, the fight to control the narrative of the war is one of the major reasons for the increasing hostility against the press. On-the-ground fighting is accompanied by misinformation, disinformation, and a war of narratives on social media. In the beginning the government even insisted on calling the conflict a “law enforcement operation” rather than a war. Journalists and commentators expressing dissenting views, or doing independent reporting, became vulnerable to arrest, threats, expulsions, and other forms of attacks.

The crackdown on the press is also happening within the context of human rights violations from all sides of this war, as documented by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. In some cases, detained journalists have been held as part of broader sweeps in which thousands of people have been arbitrarily arrested, according to CPJ’s own reporting as well as reports by human rights watchdogs and the media.

How many journalists have been arrested in Ethiopia since the start of the war?

CPJ has documented the arrest of at least 63 journalists and media workers since November 4, 2020, at least eight of whom remain detained as of August 1, 2022. All the detentions that CPJ has documented so far have been in Addis Ababa, the capital; Oromia, Amhara, Afar, and Somali states; and more recently in rebel-held Tigray state, which has been under a telecommunications blackout for most of this war, making it difficult to researchreports that even more journalists are held there.

Most detentions follow a similar script: authorities arrest a journalist or media worker and present them in court requesting more and more time to hold them for investigations. These proceedings have resulted in formal charges in very few of the cases documented by CPJ. When the courts eventually grant bail, police frequently mount appeals that delay the journalists’ releases. Some journalists are detained without access to family or legal counsel, such as in the cases of Gobeze Sisay–who was arrested on May 1 and held for a week–and Yayesew Shimelis, who was held at an unknown location  from June 28 to July 8.

Freed journalists have told CPJ of restrictions on their bank accounts and movements even after their release.

These detentions have a ripple effect on the broader media community. In 2021, Awlo Media Center shut down after its staff were arrested in mid-2021. CPJ also spoke to four previously detained journalists who said they were no longer working in journalism. Self-censorship becomes an inevitable by-product in an environment of fear, eroding the diversity within public discourse and undermining the public’s right to know. 

What other actions have been taken against the media?

Journalists have faced physical attacks. In February 2021, men thought to be intelligence personnel raided the home of freelancer Lucy Kassa and warned her about reporting on the conflict. A group of four unidentified men abducted and assaulted online journalist Abebe Bayu in June 2021.

In 2021, CPJ documented the first killing of an Ethiopian journalist – Sisay Fida – in connection with their work since 1998. Sisay’s death was attributed by authorities to the Oromo Liberation Army, an insurgent group allied with the TPLF. CPJ continues to investigate the motive behind the killing of a second journalist, Dawit Kebede Araya, who was shot in Mekelle, Tigray, in January 2021, at a time when the city was in the hands of federal authorities.

Addis Standard, an independent publication, was suspended for a week in 2021. New York Times correspondent Simon Marks was expelled in May 2021. Tom Gardner, an Economist correspondent expelled from Ethiopia in May 2022, has recounted how he was harassed online and offline.

Telecommunications disruptions also continue to affect Tigray region, as well as parts of Amhara and Afar state, undermining media coverage of the war, according to CPJ’s reporting and research by the digital rights organization Access Now. The shutdown has hampered CPJ’s research into the killing of Dawit Kebede Araya, the recent detention of five Tigrai TV reporters, as well reports that other journalists may be detained in the region.

CPJ’s annual prison census documented at least nine journalists jailed in Ethiopia on December 1, 2021. CPJ has since confirmed that seven others were also in jail on that date. How does that affect CPJ’s census data for that year?

It’s important to understand that CPJ’s census reflects research based on a specific indicator – it is a snapshot of journalists jailed around the world on December 1. We do not include journalists released before or arrested after that date, or if we cannot confirm until after the census’ deadline that a journalist was in jail on December 1.

We did not include an additional seven journalists in the 2021 census because we either were not aware of their detention at the time, or we were still investigating the details of their cases. Had we been able to confirm the details ahead of the 2021 census publication, the data would have reflected that Ethiopia had 16 journalists in jail on December 1 – meaning that it would have tied with Eritrea as sub-Saharan Africa’s worst jailer of journalists.

We have since reported the additional arrests as part of our daily coverage on our website andwill adjust our 2021 prison database when we publish our census for 2022.

What does CPJ recommend to improve Ethiopia’s press freedom climate?

The authorities – at federal and state level – need to stop detaining journalists for their reporting. That would go far in clearing the fog of fear that characterizes the current media climate. Authorities need to address the injustices committed against journalists and ensure state institutions cannot be used to gag and harass the press in the future.

Impunity breeds attacks on journalists, so authorities must do more to conduct credible, transparent investigations into physical attacks and to ensure the perpetrators are held accountable. Ongoing telecommunications disruptions should end, and journalists should be allowed the free access they need to not only report the war, but other matters of public interest in Ethiopia.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Muthoki Mumo.

During a recent meeting of the House Judiciary Committee, Democratic Congressmember Lucy McBath of Georgia shared her personal story about accessing reproductive care after experiencing a stillbirth. In doing so, she pointed out how anti-abortion politicians and legislators fail to see the medical necessity of abortion in instances such as hers. “We can be the nation that rolls back the clock, that rolls back the rights of women, and that strips them of their very liberty, or we can be the nation of choice, the nation where every woman can make her own choice,” says McBath.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

During a meeting of the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Democratic Congressmember Lucy McBath of Georgia shared her personal story about accessing reproductive care after experiencing a stillbirth. In doing so, she pointed out how anti-abortion politicians and legislators fail to see the medical necessity of abortion in instances such as hers. “We can be the nation that rolls back the clock, that rolls back the rights of women, and that strips them of their very liberty. Or we can be the nation of choice — the nation where every woman can make her own choice,” says McBath.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Congresswoman Lucy McBath on Wednesday shared her own difficult experiences to point out how attacks on abortion rights by right-wing judges and legislators could impact what treatment doctors can provide to patients who, like her, endure miscarriage and stillbirth.

The Georgia Democrat's comments came during a U.S. House Judiciary Committee hearing entitled "Revoking Your Rights: The Ongoing Crisis in Abortion Care Access," an event held as the country prepares for the Supreme Court to issue a final ruling expected to reverse Roe v. Wade.

"For two weeks, I carried a lost pregnancy and the torment that comes with it," McBath said. "I never went into labor on my own. When my doctor finally induced me, I faced the pain of labor without hope for a living child."

"This is my story—it's uniquely my story—and yet it's not so unique," McBath continued, noting how common pregnancy loss is. "And so I ask, on behalf of these women: After which failed pregnancy should I have been imprisoned?"

"Would it have been after the first miscarriage, after doctors used what would be an illegal drug to abort the lost fetus?" she asked. "Would you have put me in jail after the second miscarriage?"

"Or would you have put me behind bars after my stillbirth—after I was forced to carry a dead fetus for weeks, after asking God if I was ever going to be able to raise a child?" she continued, explaining that her questions were relevant because "the same medicine used to treat my failed pregnancies is the same medicine states like Texas would make illegal."

In the United States, miscarriage is usually defined as pregnancy loss before the 20th week while stillbirth is one that occurs after, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

New Hampshire Public Radio reported last week that a "recent experience in Texas illustrates that medical care for miscarriages and dangerous ectopic pregnancies would also be threatened if restrictions become more widespread."

As the outlet detailed:

One Texas law passed last year lists several medications as abortion-inducing drugs and largely bars their use for abortion after the seventh week of pregnancy. But two of those drugs, misoprostol and mifepristone, are the only drugs recommended in the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists guidelines for treating a patient after an early pregnancy loss.

The other miscarriage treatment is a procedure described as surgical uterine evacuation to remove the pregnancy tissue—the same approach as for an abortion.

"The challenge is that the treatment for an abortion and the treatment for a miscarriage are exactly the same," said Dr. Sarah Prager, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Washington in Seattle and an expert in early pregnancy loss.

Republican state lawmakers have ramped up their assault on reproductive freedom in recent years with laws designed to not only limit or ban abortion but also give the U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing supermajority an opportunity to overturn Roe, which affirmed the constitutional right in 1973.

Amid a wave of anti-choice laws like one in Texas that empowers vigilantes to sue anyone who "aids or abets" an abortion after six weeks—before many people know they are pregnant—a draft Supreme Court opinion leaked earlier this month signaling the looming end of Roe and a related 1992 ruling.

In response to that draft majority opinion, U.S. Senate Democrats tried again to pass the Women's Health Protection Action, which would codify Roe—but due to the filibuster, Republican lawmakers, and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), the measure never made it to a final vote.

"We have a choice," McBath said Wednesday. "We can be the nation that rolls back the clock, that rolls back the rights of women, and that strips them of their very liberty. Or we can by the nation of choice—the nation where every woman can make her own choice. Freedom is our right to choose."

Planned Parenthood Action welcomed McBath's move, tweeting that hers was "an intense, heartbreaking story... and one she shouldn't have to tell."

"Thank you for your voice, congresswoman," the group added.

Other women in Congress have also responded to the anticipated reversal of Roe by sharing their experiences with reproductive healthcare.

Congresswoman Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) spoke with Elle about her choice—as a low-income 19-year-old mother—to end her second pregnancy in the days before Roe, emphasizing that she wanted "to share my story, not as a congresswoman, but as a poor person who had to go to great lengths to do what I did."

U.S. Rep. Marie Newman (D-Ill.) wrote for CNN's opinion section about also getting an abortion at 19, explaining that "it wasn't just my finances that drove my decision to end my pregnancy. In my heart, I knew one thing to be true: As a teenager barely out of childhood myself, I simply was not ready to take on the monumental responsibility of becoming a parent."

"I never intended to share the story of my abortion publicly," Newman tweeted last week. "But with the Supreme Court set to upend a half-century guaranteed right to an abortion in the United States, I felt it was necessary."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jessica Corbett.