EDWARD J CURTIN—Here’s a film about the 1950s – “The World As It Was” – that will tell you a great deal about life in the U.S.A. today, while disabusing anyone of the notion that nostalgia for that mephitic decade is in order, for it was a time when “democracy” tended toward totalitarianism. In doing so, it sowed the bitter fruit that is poisoning us today. Without understanding the long-standing effects of those years, it is impossible to grasp the deepest dimensions of our current nightmare. Chapter One of the documentary series, Four Died Trying, directed by John Kirby and produced by Libby Handros, appropriately subtitled: “To see where we are, look where we’ve been,” does that brilliantly.
"curtin"
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EDWARD CURTIN—Being sick and out of it for a while allows one a different perspective on the world. This is especially true for those of us who often write about politics and propaganda. A recent illness has forced me to step away from my usual routine of following political events closely. Fleeting headlines have been all I’ve noted for the past two weeks. While lying around waiting for the illness to leave, I would drift in and out of reveries and memories that would float to semi-consciousness. Feeling miserable prevented any focus or logical thinking, but not, I emphasize, thinking in a deeper, physical sense. But it also gave me a reprieve from noting the repetitive and atomizing nature of internet postings, as if one needs to be hammered over the head again and again to understand the world whose realities are much simpler than the endless scribblers and politicians are willing to admit.
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EDITOR—When Stewart first “retired” from the TV spotlight about a decade ago, we were not among the mourners. In fact, as card-carrying contrarians, we celebrated Stewart’s departure in the only way we saw fit: By reposting this classic, hard-to-surpass analysis by Steve Almond of what Jon Stewart and his protegé Stephen Colbert really represent in the maelstrom of American culture. As Almond astutely notes, “far from actually serving a newsworthy role, let alone consistently educating mass audiences and criticizing the empire…Stewart and Colbert are trivializers of evil, their legacy one of defanging the truth about systemic evil by hurling toothless parody at it.”
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Why Is Alexei Navalny’s Death Being Depicted as So Vital for Americans—As Assange Faces Final “Life or Death” Extradition Appeal?
9 minutes readGLENN GREENWALD—Glenn probes the campaign of lies in the Western media describing Navalny as an exemplary hero for opposing Putin, “the corrupt tyrant,” while paying no attention to the fate of real heroes like Julian Assange, being slowly disappeared by the American Deep State and its accomplices as punishment for revealing the Empire’s war crimes.
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EDWARD J CURTIN—With one fell stroke, the calm history lesson about Ukraine, Russia, and U.S./NATO that Putin had just delivered to the world via Tucker Carlson disappeared down the memory hole, as Biden, without any evidence, declared that “Putin and his thugs” and Putin’s “brutality” are responsible for Navalny’s death. This, of course, is a replay of the false charges sans evidence waged against Russia for an earlier poisoning of Navalny, the Skripals (since disappeared by the British government), Alexander Litvinenko, et al.