HEROIC HISTORY

JOHN PILGER—Where are those of us prepared to “utter unlawful oaths” and stand up to the authoritarians and charlatans in government, who glorify war and invent foreign enemies and criminalise dissent and who abuse and mistreat vulnerable refugees to these shores and disgracefully call them “illegals”.

RAMIN MAZAHERI—Many in Iran are so devoted to “Neither East nor West but the Islamic Republic of Iran” that they don’t accept these (mostly) mutually-beneficial and certainly not “neoliberal” terms of partnership – they want fewer Chinese goods and more Iranian-produced ones. Iran may not be have the population capabilities to be a genuine superpower like China, the US, the EU or Russia – but we’re big enough to stand alone! This strain of defiant patriotism is considered totally absurd in the West – they cannot believe that Iran will not run into China’s arms like a scared child if only China would shelter them…just as they couldn’t believe that Iran ran out of the West’s arms 40 years ago like a child fleeing a pedophile.

RICHARD HARDIGAN—For the last seven weeks, many Palestinians in Gaza have been involved in the Great March of Return, which is modeled on the 2011 Nakba Day demonstrations, when Palestinian refugees from Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and the Palestinian territories approached the border with Israel, demanding their right to return to the lands from which they were evicted. Beginning March 30, Gazans have been marching to the fence that Israel has created in order to keep them out. More than two thirds of Gaza’s two million residents are descendants of refugees created during the Nakba, and their right to return to their homeland is enshrined in several United Nations Resolutions.

BRUCE DIXON—Cable news coverage never mentions that there are 15 US military bases on Korean soil, housing anywhere from 30 to 40,000 US troops, probably nuclear armed. The largest, Camp Humphreys is in the middle of scandal-ridden expansion plans to hold 40,000 US personnel in that one spot alone, all paid for by South Korean taxpayers, not American ones. South Korean civil society has long resented its American overlords and their military presence.

The two leaders solemnly declared before the 80 million Korean people and the whole world that there will be no more war on the Korean Peninsula and thus a new era of peace has begun.