WITNESSES TO HISTORY

JACQUES R PAUWELS—To the British soldier and poet Isaac Rosenberg too, the poppies were a strong symbol in the sense of blood and sacrifice; in his poem “Break of Day in the Trenches”, he wrote that “the roots” of the poppies “are in man’s veins.”
It was not a coincidence that poppies flowered abundantly in Flanders’ Fields in the spring of 1915. Normally, the minuscule seeds of this flower penetrate deep into the earth to wait there, sometimes for years, for the soil to be upturned for some reason, and thus exposed to the sunlight and warmth they suddenly germinate. With the digging of miles of trenches and the explosion of tens if not hundreds of thousands of shells starting in the fall of 1914, the conditions were created for an unprecedented burgeoning of poppies the following spring in that corner of Belgium, of course most spectacularly so in the immediate vicinity of the trenches and in the pockmarked no-man’s land.

JIMMY DORE dissects the rather obvious reasons the Dems lost in Virginia and stand poised now to lose massively in the next presidential round. They offer nothing to the people, except lies and excuses. Their true constituency is the 0.001% of the population, the super billionaires that run the economy and the government, a truly unelected governent.

PAUL EDWARDS—[In the party of Gog] the lower groups—with some spillover from the wealthy—have simpler, more visceral biases.  While the super-wealthy have to conceal their contempt for their working-class confreres, lower-income groups feel no need to hide their gross, vulgar hatreds.  These include, but are not limited to, race hate, misogyny, and xenophobia, detestation of education, intellect, science, history, humanism, evolution, paleontology, and environmentalism.  They vigorously support religious and cultural hate, brutal exploitation of nature and other nations, all weapons—personal and of war— war-making in general, violence as mediation, crudity, cruelty, a rabid un-Christian Christianity, and killing wild animals for fun.

Taiwan has been a topic of conversation in the U.S. corporate media throughout the month of October. Headlines have circulated that claim China has escalated military tensions by flying military aircraft over Taiwan’s so-called Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ). The ADIZ was created by the United States after World War II and isn’t recognized by international law. In fact, Taiwan’s so-called ADIZ includes large portions of mainland China. This hasn’t stopped the U.S. media from beating the drums of war with China.

Because this issue is vitally important, a coalition of non-profit and human rights organizations called “Sanctions Kill5” has prepared the following report. The information and findings are the result of on- the-ground investigation in Syria plus questionnaires with citizens of some of the most severely sanctioned countries such as Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe.

The title of this report is “We don’t deserve this.” This is what a Syrian woman said when asked about the destructive impact of US sanctions on her country. The goal of this report is to inform North Americans about the real-life consequences of US-imposed sanctions.