Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – International Women’s Day (now March 8) had its origins in great social unrest, turbulence and critical debate among women in Western countries regarding their oppressive working conditions in factories and their lack of voting rights. Marching through New York City in 1908, 15,000 women demanded shorter hours, […]
Archives for March 2025
Weimar’s Lesson: It’s the Violence, Not the Speech
( Detailed Political Quizzes ) – As comparisons between contemporary American politics and the rise of the Nazi Party are frequently invoked in the media, it’s crucial to draw one specific lesson from the history of Weimar Germany, the democratic state that existed from 1918 to 1933. The rise of Hitler and the Nazis was […]
The End of the American Century, courtesy Donald J. Trump
( Tomdispatch.com ) – In the weeks leading up to the recent presidential inauguration in Washington, this country and an anxious world expected many different things from what might be called, to borrow the title of a famed William Butler Yeats’s poem, “The Second Coming” of Donald J. Trump. But nobody expected this. Nobody at […]
The Oscar-Winning Film “No Other Land” is about Palestinians who have no Place else to Go
Oakland, Ca. (Special to Informed Comment; feature) – The title of the Oscar-winning documentary, No Other Land, reflects the sad reality that these people have no place else to go. The residents are mostly goat and sheep herders, and endure snow-blanketed winters and oppressive summer heat. An aging woman whose home has just been bulldozed […]
Melting Antarctic Ice will slow the World’s strongest Ocean Current – and the global Consequences are Profound
By Taimoor Sohail, The University of Melbourne and Bishakhdatta Gayen, The University of Melbourne Flowing clockwise around Antarctica, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current is the strongest ocean current on the planet. It’s five times stronger than the Gulf Stream and more than 100 times stronger than the Amazon River. It forms part of the global ocean […]
“No other Land”: When Ordered to Destroy, we Sometimes have a Moral Obligation to Lie
( The Times of Israel ) – You are ordered—like in the Oscar-nominated documentary No Other Land—to demolish the homes, schools, and wells of Palestinian families in Masafer Yatta, a community in the West Bank that has existed since the early 1900s. The official reason: to clear the land for a live-fire military training zone. But when […]
The Netanyahu Cabinet’s War against Human Rights in Israel: B’Tselem in the Crosshairs
In early 2023, the most far-right cabinet in Israel’s history launched its war for “judicial reforms” to replace democracy with autocracy. In fall 2023, it began an obliteration war against Gaza. Now it is readying to decimate the last human rights defenders in Israel. New York (Special to Informed Comment; feature) – In the view […]
Real Christianity vs. White “Christian” Nationalist Trump on the Treatment of the Poor
( Tomdispatch.com ) – “There has almost always been an outright hostility that is shown towards people of the Christian faith,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said on a podcast recently. He was talking with Tony Perkins, a former Louisiana lawmaker and president of the Family Research Council, about freedom of religion and the actions of […]
The Trump Administration Said These Aid Programs Saved Lives. It Canceled Them Anyway
by Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Brett Murphy ( ProPublica ) – After the Trump administration moved to freeze nearly $60 billion in foreign aid in January, officials like Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeatedly assured Americans that lifesaving operations would continue. “We don’t want to see anybody die,” he told reporters in early February. Aid […]