FINIAN CUNNINGHAM—All these anti-Russian claims are unsubstantiated, if not outlandish, but they are repeated often enough to cast a permanent cloud over international relations. Republican Senator John McCain was widely quoted by way of expressing the bipartisan outrage over Trump’s phone call. “An American president does not lead the free world by congratulating dictators,” he said.
March 22, 2018
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Independent Journalist Corner: A Conversation with Luciana Bohne
39 minutes readDANNY HAIPHONG—Says Luciana Bohne: “The communist left needs no instruction. That’s the left that saw in the Soviet Union, governing a third of the planet, a system that gave birth to the most significant political movement of the 20th century, abolishing private property, developing free education, free health care, the emancipation of women, granting equality—including the right to secede-—to the nationalities enslaved within the czar’s empire, and providing diplomatic, military, financial, and technical support for the majority of anti-colonial struggles, and for the independent states they created. This left is revolutionary. The rest of the left, liberal, social democratic, reformist, etc., should set themselves the task of questioning the myths about Soviet socialism that the United States propagated throughout the Cold War through its cultural institutions…”
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GLEN FORD—According to the official numbers, Brazil’s police kill 4, 224 civilians a year. Alves asks us to “imagine a country where twelve civilians are ‘legally’ killed by the police on a daily basis.” Seventy-six percent of the dead are Black, meaning nine Black men or boys are killed by Brazilian police every day (99 percent are male). Alves notes that these statistics “do not count the ‘disappeared’ and ‘unknown’ that have turned poor and predominantly black urban communities in Brazil into macabre geographies.”
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‘Those Who Committed the Crime of Torture Actually Get Promoted’
18 minutes readJANINE JACKSON—The New York Times is talking about how Haspel’s nomination will “reignite the wrenching debate” over interrogation “techniques,” like waterboarding, confinement in boxes and sleep deprivation. First of all, it sounds like those being hurt are the ones who have to debate the issue, you know, or look at the photographs, rather than the people who were and who may be tortured.
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Wonder Wheel: Woody Allen’s latest film—and the campaign to drive him out of the film industry
18 minutes readJOANNE LAURIER—The authors found a couple of Allen defenders, including actor Alec Baldwin, who has made a number of principled statements. In January, Baldwin tweeted, “Woody Allen was investigated forensically by two states (NY and CT) and no charges were filed. The renunciation of him and his work, no doubt, has some purpose. But it’s unfair and sad to me.” He added that he had worked with Allen three times “and it was one of the privileges of my career.”
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