We are closed in, and the key is turnedon our uncertainty…We had fed the heart on fantasies,the heart’s grown brutal from the fare,more substance in our enmitiesthan in our love; (WB Yeats,The Empty House of the Stare) Traumas make for suffering as scholasticide becomes a destroyer of learning, thus tearing asunder the intricate tapestry […]
Representative, it is Shameful that you Voted to Sanction the Justices of the Int’l Criminal Court for Netanyahu Arrest Warrant
Letter to Representative Jared Golden (D-ME) Dear Representative Jared Golden: Your decision to vote in favor of sanctioning the International Criminal Court of Justice, (ICC) which had ordered Israel to take steps to prevent genocide in Gaza, was dismaying. This recent vote to sanction the ICC by Representatives of Congress erodes the ability of the […]
Gaza’s Afflictions: A Proem
Orono, Maine (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Empathy will never be exhausted as gaza schools and hospitals are torn asunder by pilots in fighter jets, their grievances transposed from another time and place into strafing refugee villages with clinical precision; All good gained from sufferings of times long past, all dissipated by the voracious bombing of innocents […]
The Great Babylon: America’s complicity in Gaza Atrocities
Orono, Maine (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Yesterday, I interviewed a refugee Ukrainian family in transition from their homeland looking for a permanent place to settle. They were being visited by evangelical church friends. Since I was teaching a course on current world conflicts, the conversation turned to Palestine/Israel where a number of references […]
War, Trauma, and Forgetting
Orono, Maine (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Our memories are often suppressed by trauma, a word derived from “Traumatiko”, a wound or mental shock. Examples of traumatic events are people being compelled to leave their homes due to war, disease, drought, famine or similar events. Recent sociological studies on the after-effects of war reveal […]
Israel’s Netanyahu: An Oliver Cromwell for our Times
“When plunder [and dispossession] becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” — Frédéric Bastiat Ilan Pappe, the Israeli historian, wrote in “The Forgotten Palestinians” that “Zionism was born […]
The Moral Consequences of the War on Gaza
Orono, Maine (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – The moral high ground, has been lost by Israel in the Gaza onslaught while it attempts to avenge the Hamas attacks on Oct 7. The leaders of the Knesset seem convinced that the slaughter of 15,000 civilians is justified and that there will be no moral consequences. […]
Irish History Resonates in Gaza
“I and the public know/ What all schoolchildren learn/ Those to whom evil is done/ do evil in return.” — W. H. Auden | Orono, Maine (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – There were elements in Ireland whose anger against Britain overwhelmed any other sentiment. Three hundred years of settler colonialism, dispossession and denigration of […]
In Celtic Culture, August 1 is a Harvest Feast for the Sun-God, Lugh, and its Traces are All Around Us
Orono, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – We are approaching August 1 which, in Scottish and Irish tradition, is the Feast of Lughnasadh (La Lunasa), also known as Lammas Day. It is one of the four most important festival days in Celtic countries and was originally meant to celebrate Lugh’s birth. Lugh (pronounced Lu or […]
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