Category: Human Rights

Kicking the Vietnam Syndrome

From the Archive: With Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf’s death on Thursday and the declining health of ex-President George H.W. Bush an era of war and intrigue is coming to an end, a time of resurgent U.S. imperialism that saw this warrior seeking peace and the…

The Price of Revolutionary Illusions

Exclusive: A number of Americans on the Right and Left embrace fantasies about fighting some glorious revolution in the future, requiring them to maintain arsenals of weapons today, even if the cost of their violent illusions is the brutal murder of children…

Learning from Endless War

The backdrop of the Newtown massacre and similar slaughters across America is how frequently the U.S. government opts for violence to settle problems around the world, a message that might influence a troubled individual with access to a gun, says Laura…

America’s Frontier Mentality

Much as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once opined that the sanctions-related deaths of Iraqi children was “worth it,” many Americans seem to believe that the periodic slaughter of children at home is just the price for their “liberty” to own…

NRA Suggests a Police State

Exclusive: The irony of the NRA’s crackpot idea for protecting America’s children by dramatically expanding the use of armed guards is that the proposal would push the U.S. further down the path toward a police state, threatening the “liberties” that…

Christmas Eve Freedom-Fighting in 1837

Americans often romanticize the early years of the Republic, averting their eyes from the crude racism in the U.S. Constitution and the cruel treatment of blacks and Native Americans in those decades. Overlooked are brave freedom fighters who resisted arrogant…

The Right’s Second Amendment Lies

Exclusive: A big obstacle to commonsense gun control is the Right’s false historical narrative that the Founders wanted an armed American public that could fight its own government. The truth is that George Washington looked to citizens militias to put down revolts and…

Slaughter of the Innocents

Americans are grieving over the 20 schoolchildren and six teachers mowed down in Newtown, Connecticut, by a deranged gunman with a semi-automatic assault rifle. But national grief may not be enough to overcome the cold calculations of profit and politics, says Danny Schechter.

The Right’s ‘Limited Government’ Scam

Exclusive: Libertarians and Tea Partiers pretend they are the only Americans who believe in “limited government” as envisioned by the Framers, but that is a false conceit. The real history is that Madison and Washington devised a Constitution with broad powers to promote…

An Inconvenient Truth: Israeli Apartheid

Israel and its apologists react in fury when anyone likens the oppression of Palestinians to South Africa’s white supremacist system of apartheid toward blacks, but the comparison is growing harder and harder to dispute, a disturbing reality that ex-CIA analyst…