WJ ASTORE—Who says the Pentagon leadership learned nothing from Vietnam? They learned how to wage open-ended wars basically forever, which has proved useful indeed when it comes to justifying and sustaining epic military budgets and the political authority that goes with them.
NELLY CARCAMO—One thing was clear, that “the agreement for peace and a new constitution” was not born to deepen democracy, nor to abandon the notion of a subsidiary State, nor to strengthen the fundamental rights of the people. Nor was it intended to establish effective legal guarantees to protect, for example, economic, social and cultural rights. Therefore, that agreement from above, was simply a desperate exit to buy time.
PAULINE BOCK—A few days before the gilets jaunes’s first anniversary march (or “act 53” of their weekly protests), French newspaper Libération reported that the interior ministry was set to approve a “new national plan for law enforcement” that supports the police’s harsh, aggressive tactics for crowd control — despite the hundreds of injuries this approach has caused.
JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER—The mass media-propaganda system, part of the larger corporate matrix, is now merging into a social media-based propaganda system that is more porous and seemingly anarchic, but more universal and more than ever favoring money and power. Utilizing modern marketing and surveillance techniques, which now dominate all digital interactions, vested interests are able to tailor their messages, largely unchecked, to individuals and their social networks, creating concerns about “fake news” on all sides.
EDWARD SAID—Sure enough Sartre did have something for us: a prepared text of about two typed pages that – I write entirely on the basis of a twenty-year-old memory of the moment – praised the courage of Anwar Sadat in the most banal platitudes imaginable. I cannot recall that many words were said about the Palestinians, or about territory, or about the tragic past. Certainly no reference was made to Israeli settler-colonialism, similar in many ways to French practice in Algeria. It was about as informative as a Reuters dispatch, obviously written by the egregious Victor to get Sartre, whom he seemed completely to command, off the hook.