Fifty Years Ago, They Said No

Fifty years ago this fall, a campus upsurge turned opposition to the Vietnam War into a genuine mass movement.

On October 15, 1969, several million students, along with community-based activists, participated in anti-war events under the banner of the “Vietnam Moratorium.”

A month later, 500,000 people came to a Washington, D.C. demonstration of then-unprecedented size, organized by the “New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.”--SE


A new book documenting the Vietnam era GI antiwar movement.


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Of Interest

Ontology is important. We need to define what is right-wing and what is populist. Some of the appeal of Trump, of Nigel Farage, the leader of the Brexit Party in Britain, is the very non-right-wingness. The apparent standing up for the little man, standing up for the worker against big business, against the bankers and the establishment—Trump played that card very well in the Rust Belt of the United States. Nigel Farage played it very cannily in similar places in the Brexit referendum in Britain. The support they garnered was not in fact right-wing, but left-wing. It was an anti-capitalist critique of the kind of finance capitalist model that has beggared millions of people and whole areas of your country and mine. When they say populist, I wonder if they really mean popular. I am attacked as a left-wing populist. But what does that actually mean?--George Galloway to Chris Hedges

A leading British socialist speaks with Chris Hedges for Truthdig.


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The Original Rules of College Foot Ball

On Nov. 6, 1869, the first-ever college football game was played between the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) and Rutgers College. The game bore little resemblance to college football as we know it today, with a far different set of rules designed to minimize scoring and maximize the bone-crushing -- and often deadly -- violence that characterized the sport's early years. A century and a half later, we've uncovered the original rulebook that was used for that first game, which provides a fascinating glimpse into the sport's rudimentary beginnings and reveals just how dramatically it has changed over the past 150 years.--SE

With another season of my favorite American game straight ahead and barreling at us like a berserk fullback (a seldom used position player of long ago) bent on annihilation, it is past time to review the original game's rules and purpose.

As Law Two Sec. D reads: "The main point of Foot Ball is maiming."

There you have it, the once written--and now secret--rule of the modern game, which many fans today refer to as "war."


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Leary

This turned up in my inbox this morning, with a request to get it into the hands of an important third party. I've never paid much attention to Denis Leary, but perhaps I should have. This is pretty damn good.


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Sweet Writing

+ Many of the liberals talking the loudest about “white supremacy” on MSDNC have only known its privileges, thus they would have us believe white supremacy resides only in the vile minds of the KKK and Aryan Nations, instead of the racist forces operating inside the banks, the school boards, the police, the FBI, the Pentagon that degrade, impoverish and kill people every single day.--JSC

St. Clair nailing it, per usual.

DiMaggio, Levine and Street, et al., put it out there.  The old gang never gets old.


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Send Her Back

(click on image to enlarge)

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Her Belligerence: Night of the Long Knives

Pelosi later met with Ocasio-Cortez, but that did little to repair the damage. Lost in the media hubbub was the reality that Pelosi didn’t only express thinly veiled contempt toward four deeply progressive congresswomen; she was also conveying a similar attitude toward millions of Americans who share their political outlooks, while many have been drawn into political engagement due to their achievements. As our letter put it, “Dismissive comments about new progressive members of Congress have given the impression of a disdainful attitude toward like-minded progressives and Democratic activists across the country.”--NS

Yep, it sure sounds like Pelosi bought herself all the power a lil' ol' California multi-millionaire thinks she's entitled to and resents uppity leftist women from progressive districts challenging her empire.

Pelosi gives me the same indigestion that Hillary Clinton always has.  I can't look at her without belching.  Listening to her causes all the oxygen around me to be sucked away by evil monsters that crawl from her fleshy old face.  Drowning has a more favorable feeling. I feel like I'm being waterboarded. I'm covered in gasoline and someone nearby holds a match. I'm in a nightmare and the worst enemies of my past have surrounded me. They're armed with kitchen knives.  They're closing in step by step.  I won't survive this one.


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American Slaughter

Democrats, on the whole, are smarter than Republicans, but they are more base and servile, more pusillanimous, and a whole lot more hypocritical. Republicans are worse, of course. One could gaze upon them and despair for the human race, even before Trump made them worse still. But Democrats! What’s not to hate?--AL

Andrew Levine sprays his Uzi-like intellect around the room.

The assault continues from every direction.


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Weekend News

Anyone with normal sensibilities who does not tune the world out completely cannot help but find the Trump presidency disorienting and upsetting – not only because the fate of the planet is in the hands of an illiberal, willfully ignorant, inept, sleaze ball with a Mussolini smirk, whose modus operandi is to stir up racial animosities, and who delights in gratuitous displays of cruelty towards black and brown people, but also in the way that people feel in the course of a nightmare from which they cannot awaken.--AL

A Mussolini smirk, and more.

The good stuff doesn't stop.


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It Must Be Thursday

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Perfect

The next 10 days of summer!


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Fascist Surge

The terror of the unforeseen becomes ominous when history is used to hide rather than to illuminate the past, when it becomes difficult to translate private issues into larger systemic considerations, and people allow themselves to be both seduced and trapped into spectacles of violence, cruelty and authoritarian impulses. Reading the world critically and developing a historical consciousness are two important preconditions for intervening in the world. That is why critical reading and reading critically are so dangerous to Trump, his acolytes and those who hate democracy. Democracy as both an ideal and site of struggle can only survive with a public attentiveness to the power of history, politics and the rigor of informed judgments and thoughtful actions. It can only survive when we are willing to engage the power to think otherwise in order to act otherwise.--HG

If you cannot connect the dots between Nancy Pelosi's rhetoric around "the squad" (she bitched them out in private and public spaces) and Trump's full-on overt racism, you've missed the point, i.e., you haven't comprehended how totally consumptive the drift to fascism is in our current polity.

Henry Giroux goes into the depths.

The setup.


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Big News!

Alongside and consistent with other privilege- and power-serving missions, so-called mainstream corporate media’s role is to keep the populace focused as best it can on relatively trivial matters and diverted from the most urgent topics of our time.--PS

Street with a truthy mouthful.

Democratic hopefuls will be back at it over two nights in Detroit later this month; more or less the same twenty candidates as in June, presumably again at ten a pop. The composition of the two groups will be determined later and, as before, left to chance.--AL

Levine takes a deep dive into the future.


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Gene Faulkner

www.genefaulkner.com


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Sunday Sermon

In the exclusive Truthout interview below, renowned public intellectual Noam Chomsky — one of the world’s most astute critics of U.S. foreign policy in the postwar era — sheds considerable light on the current state of U.S. foreign policy, including Trump’s relations with the leaders of North Korea, Russia and China, as well as his so-called “Middle East Peace Plan.”--CJP

Get your political religion on.


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